I get a daily email from Rediff.com. Usually I don’t have time to skim it for Sepia-ness, but tonight, I finished your 55s with time to spare so I gave it a cursory cook. :) Near the bottom of the tailored-to-my-preferences Rediff-o-gram were the following words: Top Malayalam Actors 2005. Like I could pass THAT headline up. ;)

Before the page even loaded in a foxy new tab, I knew I was going to spy with my round eye either Mohanlal or Mamooty. Survey says? The man to the right, Mohanlal. I found myself wondering, “Sheesh…ARE there other mallu phillum actors besides those two??”

Browsing through the pictorial essay taught me that Manoj K Jayan (Anandabhadram), Dileep (Chaandupottu) and Suresh Gopi (Bharat Chandran IPS) also act in the sort of films my Aunt and Uncle sigh over as they eat their kappa and karrimeen (washed down with kappi, natch). I don’t join in, mostly because I hate kappa and meen. ;)

Perusing all this coconut-flavored photography, all I could notice was moustaches. Malayalee men are devoted to them and I was actually shocked when I noticed that one of the men pictured (Jayan) did NOT have one. It weirds me out as I pause and grok that I NEVER saw my father without a meesha. Same with the majority of my uncles. Meanwhile, I loathe facial hair, goatees included. No wonder I’m not married. ;) Well, it’s either that or because I’m on the wrong team.

The next time I prattle on about orgies, nanofiction and Fridays, there will be a “six” marking the days of our lives instead of a “five”. :) I didn’t know what would happen the first time I posted about daring to write short-shorts; I certainly had no expectation that fiction-filled Fridays would become a much-loved tradition here at the Mutiny. Now, I can’t imagine an SM without tiny stories, each exactly 55 words in length.

Thank you for writing so regularly, so publicly, so generously. You have become some of my favorite authors, and reading your creations is something I look forward to all week long. For those of you who lurk, doubt or hesitate…make one of your resolutions a promise to yourself that you will write. Almost everyone I know lists “write a novel” when answering one of those silly numbered/question-riddled memes, specifically when asked about “things you’d like to accomplish eventually”. Baby steps. Fifty-five of them. You can do it, we’ll be thrilled to watch you try.

Happy New Year, writers. :)

Sanjay Leela Bhansali fan and Time film critic Richard Corliss just named Black to his top ten movies of 2005. Here’s the catch: like that famous Aishwarya Rai cover, the list is only for Time Asia. The same spot on the U.S. list is occupied by Caché.

Rani Mukherjee in Black

This is an unofficial remake of the 1962 U.S. film The Miracle Worker, about the deaf-blind child Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan… This is an unusual film for India: no songs, a running time under 2 hrs. and most of the dialogue in English… Amitabh… harnesses gravity and humor to his magisterial machismo in what may be his greatest role… In so many Indian films the deepest searches are for romantic ecstasy and for reconciliation with the father figure. By addressing both these needs, Black is more than a noble weepie; it is the ultimate Bollywood love story. [Link]

Heh, ‘unofficial remake’ Corliss may still be smarting over the collective global yawn over Devdas:

I wished Devdas had been in the competition for the Palme d’Or; it bested the Festival winner, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, in verve, visual acuity and the hero’s sanctified suffering… it could also be the most visually intoxicating film ever[Devdas] could also be the most visually intoxicating film ever…

My devotion to Devdas was a minority opinion at Cannes. The pack of international critics is usually a tolerant one; I might say they share some of the Devdas hero’s self-flagellating tendencies, since each May they sit obediently through dozens of mopey minimalist movies. (This year’s prime example: The Brown Bunny, the notoriously painful American indie that only a handful of scribes walked out on.) Yet in 2002… exactly one critic — and by now you’ve figured out who — was there at the end… for TIME’s International editions, I went further, really too far, and named it the film of the year…

But you never heard of Devdas. That’s because no review appeared in the major New York or L.A. newspapers, or in most others, when the film opened last July. [Link]

A 29-year-old Bangla woman from Queens was accidentally killed two nights ago when a new army recruit fired celebratory shots outside her window:

Selina Akther was shot in the head and died instantly at the window of her fifth-floor apartment in the Queens borough of New York. Police arrested a US soldier who they said was on leave and had been drinking when he fired shots into the air. [Link]

It had been a night of celebration for the young Army private, who had just returned from basic training at Ft. Hood, Texas. “We believe he was out partying with his girlfriend and he comes upon his friends,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said at police headquarters. “He approached his friends, and that’s when he fires the shots in the air.” [Link]

After being shot, Ms. Akther lay bleeding on the living-room floor by the bullet-pocked window for about 20 minutes until her husband saw her and realized she was not breathing…

According to a law enforcement official, Private Carpio was extremely remorseful, and was cooperative in trying to help police find the gun, which he said he threw away after firing into the air. The official, who requested anonymity because the investigation was continuing, said Private Carpio had told investigators that while home on leave, he had visited his goddaughter, drank some beer and vodka, left his family and bumped into some old friends, and then, he said, did “something real stupid.” It was not until the next morning that he saw on the news that a mother had been killed. [Link]

The use of fire in achieving moral purity:

Hindus in India are cremated upon open grounds upon wooden pyres…The body is to be set alight only by the male child of the deceased, or the closest male relative. [Wikipedia]

Thousands of alleged militants, human rights activists, and ordinary Sikhs in Punjab were summarily executed by security forces… Their bodies were then cremated to destroy the evidence… His investigation led him to enquire into the purchase of firewood by security forces. He found that thousands of so-called unidentified or unclaimed bodies were being secretly cremated by the police with this firewood. [Human Rights Watch]

Today’s WaPo:

But the detainees were moved elsewhere to similar CIA prisons, referred to as “black sites” in classified documents… The agency is working to establish procedures in the event a prisoner dies in custody. One proposal circulating among mid-level officers calls for rushing in a CIA pathologist to perform an autopsy and then quickly burning the body, according to two sources. [Washington Post]

Here’s yet another Russell Peters comedy clip. A thinner Peters makes an appearance on the Beeb and does a shout-out to Meera Syal, who’s sitting in the front row.

Madhuri Dixit and Vinod Khanna in Dayavaan

You’ve probably heard most of the material before, but there’s a cute joke about what porn would be like if it conformed to the standards of Bollywood censors. Contrary to popular belief, there have been oodles of smooches in Bollywood films, including by the faux-virginal Rai, and even some toplessness.

Way back in 1933, Devika Rani shocked people with her lingering kiss with Himanshu Rai in Karma. [Link]

… [Dimple Kapadia] created as big a splash with her comeback in Saagar when she flashed her exposed breasts to the camera for a few quick frames… a shocking first for a mainstream actress in a Bollywood film. [Link]

Mrs. Kapadia presents! This gallery of kisses through Bollywood history is way too rrro-man-tik to be saved for V Day.

For readers of different suasion, try Dosti: Friends Forever (trailer). Bobby Deol and Akshay Kumar gaze deeply into each other’s eyes, vowing eternal love and loyalty… on motorcycles. They were trying for ‘Yeh Dosti’ from Sholay, with Deol as the younger Dharmendra. What they got instead was Brokeback Hillstation. A film culture which only mentions gays when ridiculing them, affords lots of room for hot hetero phrendship.

Following up on my post about Bobby Jindal being named Person of the Year by the India Abroad newspaper, a helpful anonymous source has emailed us a copy of the letter sent to the editor of India Abroad, expressing displeasure at their choice. What makes this story interesting is the list of signatories:

• Anurima Bhargava — Staff Attorney, NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund
• Vanita Gupta — Staff Attorney, NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, past winner of the Reebok Human Rights Award and India Abroad Publisher’s Special Award for Outstanding Achievement
• Shyam Maskai — attorney in private practice, former President of the South Asian Bar Association of New York
• Cyrus D. Mehta — leading immigration lawyer, TV commentator on immigration law issues, and member of the Executive Committee of the NYC Bar Association
• Purvi Shah — Executive Director, Sakhi for South Asian Women

Here is an excerpt of the full letter:

Dear Editor:

We attended the function on December 9 where Congressman Bobby Jindal received The India Abroad Person of the Year 2005 award. In his acceptance speech, Mr. Jindal paid tribute to the achievements of the Indian-American community, especially its first generation immigrants who, like his parents, have sacrificed much to enable the next generation to fulfill their dreams.

On December 16, a week after winning the award, Mr. Jindal voted in favor of The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, H.R. 4437, which if passed into law, would destroy immigrant families by creating new grounds of deportability and gutting immigrants’ due process rights.

An erstwhile IIT prof is dead and several others remain injured, after a brazen terrorist attack at a conference which was being held at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore (Thanks Aj, for the link):

The suspected Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) terrorist entered the complex through the main gate, took out hand grenades and an automatic rifle and started firing indiscriminately at the scientists who had come to attend the International Conference on Operations Research Applications in Infrastructure Development —2005, according to eyewitnesses.

While Prof M C Puri succumbed to injuries at the M S Ramaiah Hospital, Dr Pankaj Gupta, Patellappa, an IISC employee, Dr Sangeetha, Dr Vijay Chandra and four others were injured. All the scientists had come from Delhi and other places to attend the international conference.

When security isn’t secure enough:

Only three private security guards were on duty when the incident occurred. They were not trained for this situation, according to sources.

More, this time from Rediff:

Sources said the possibility of terror attack could not be ruled out given the nature of the automatic weapons used in the attack. A state-wide alert has been sounded…

The officials are also trying to ascertain whether the underworld had any role in Wednesday’s incident as the main accused in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, Abu Salem is in Bangalore to undergo lie detector and brain mapping tests, sources said.

Dear () :

First, allow me to congratulate you on your excessively clever handle. Normally, I’d be jumping out of my chair like the little cartoon man who signifies “stellar!” for the San Francisco Chronicle’s arts reviews, out of appreciation of your FANTASTIC taste in music, but I am almost 99.9% certain that you weren’t paying tribute to a three-year old release from Sigur Ros with the whole empty parentheses schtick.

Second, allow me to even more sarcastically congratulate you on your attempt at incisive commentary, issued in support of the link you wanted to tip us to…ouch, I think it gave me an owie:

Islamic terrorists attack IISc in Bangalore and shoot a professor dead. Such beautiful gift from our loving South Asian brothers deserve a mention on this blog….or perhaps you’d choose to bury your head in the sand and pretend that this doesn’t/didn’t/won’t happen.

Not.

This trifling game is getting so old, I can pay a premium for it (still in the original box! mint!) on eBay. This Mutiny is brown. We like the term “South Asian”. We write about stuff that happens in the countries that surround India. We care. If you don’t, then that’s unfortunate. Getting snide in an ANONYMOUS tip isn’t going to change our minds, surely you had to be aware of that. If not, let this “musing” of mine clue you in: inclusiveness is how we roll, even though every one of our parents once had an Indian passport and exactly eight dollars in their pocket, upon landing at JFK.

As I am sure you have all noticed, the number of posts here at Sepia Mutiny have declined during the past week. All of us have fled from our blogging world headquarters in North Dakota and are currently traveling parts of the country. I myself am safely ensconsed in a suburb of D.C. and will soon make my way up the coast for New Years festivities. Unfortunately, the safehouse I am currently at has only a 28.8 Kbps rate phone line, which means that every post is completed only after a Herculean effort. Similarly, the other mutineers are adjusting to life on the outside for a week or two. Our current situation is kind of like the one Morgan Freeman’s character faced in the Shawshank Redemption when he finally got out of prison. Life on the outside is hard to get used to after one has been institutionalised. I fear that many of us felt the same as we left North Dakota. We do want a shot at a normal life though. Hopefully we will run into some of our readers on the outside during these holidays.

As the year draws to a close, we at Sepia Mutiny would once again like to thank our readers and wish them a happy holiday season. I am sure that I can safely speak for my co-bloggers when I say that any success this site sees is only partially attributable to the bloggers here. Our readers and their comments complete us. We have now logged over 2 million visitors. SM has also gotten two recent shout outs and I’d like to point them out as thanks. Today Feedster named us the #5 Feed of the Year.

This feed is aimed at South Asians, and provides a feisty and entertaining look at cultural and political issues involved in what the site editors call a “Diaspora.” No Forums, but site features a wide variety of well-informed, well-traveled and well-opinionated contributors. [Link]

Feedster index of over eighteen million syndicated feeds, including more than 75,000 professionally published sources such as the BBC, CNET, The New York Times, and Wired.

Feedster Searches for Updated Posts from Millions of Sources [Link]

Any self-respecting, well-connected desi in SF has found himself at a DhamaalSF party or 2 over the years. Dhamaal’s recent Halloween party, for example, was a world-beater - at least when it came to mutinous content. Alas, the denizens of the city by the bay will have to go a while longer before the next one. Our boyz are back in da homeland -

Dhamaal Soundsystem, one of America’s most vibrant South Asian club performers and music bands, is currently touring India, and plans to set dance floors on fire in Mumbai, Goa and New Delhi.

San Francisco’s native sons are taking on the world with their unique twist on South Asian soundz -

The San Francisco-based group, which is a rage among alternative and South Asian music lovers in the US, consists of 20-odd members, including technicians, who trace their roots to different parts of the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka.

“Our goal is to showcase South Asian or sub-continental music, including sufi, Hindustani and Carnatic classical with a Western perspective,” Maneesh Kenia, who set up Dhamaal in 1999 with DJ and producer Janaka Selekta, told IANS.

…”Please do not perceive us as another group which just hitchhikes on Bollywood remixes and Bhangra-hip hop,” said Maneesh, an Indian American who quit his career in music software to follow his passion.

DNA India gives us a few blurbs about the origins of this veritable SF institution -

Dhamaal was born when a few friends got together and hosted a house party seven years ago. “We’re a 20 strong group and we do the whole live experience with the DJs, video, artistry, etc,” says Dhruv.

Their parties are renowned for the eclectic mix of desi’s, non-desi’s, artistes, techies (we’re in SF, afterall), and alterna-culture fans across the Bay Area. Dhamaal’s website, gallery, and, most importantly, music clips can be found on their website - http://www.dhamaalsf.com/.

A great many tipsters are informing us that People Magazine has included an Indian American as one of its Sexiest Men Alive. Yeah, he’s half Indian and he is “sexy.” So what, I say? That doesn’t really seem that blog-worthy to me. However, what eventually convinced me as to the importance of getting this story out to the people isn’t the fact that he is representing Indian Americans, but rather that he is a proxy for the previously unacknowledged sexiness of all geologists in the Earth and Space Sciences Departments of schools in the University of California system. Meet Michael Manga:

People magazine has featured a geophysicist of Indian origin alongside the likes of U2 frontman Bono in the ‘Smart Guys’ section of its ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ issue.

Michael Manga, a 37-year-old geology professor of UC Berkeley, who won the $500,000 MacArthur ‘genius’ grant earlier in 2005, shares pages with stars like Matthew McConaughey, Matt Damon, Jake Gyllenhaal and Orlando Bloom among others.

“My first inclination, of course, was to say no, because that’s not how I perceive myself,” Manga, father of two boys, said. “But it is a way to let people know about science and that it is OK to be a scientist.” [link]

I think it is a particularly sad commentary on the decadence of our culture that it has taken THIS long to point out that there are in fact “sexy” Indian geologists that deserve to share the same page as Bono.

Manga was one of only two men in academia admitted to the ranks of America’s dreamiest dudes. “That’s why I agreed to do this,” he explains.

“I wanted to get information out to people who wouldn’t normally hear or see anything about science.”

Amnesty International has issued an urgent action report to save a Mallu dude from getting an eye gouged out by the famed prison surgeons of Saudi Arabia -

Puthen Veetil Abdul Latheef Noushad has reportedly been sentenced to have an eye removed. The sentence is said to have been passed to a higher court and if upheld, could be inflicted at any time.

According to press reports, the sentence is punishment for partially blinding another man during a fight in April 2003. He was apparently working at a petrol station in the city of Dammam, in the eastern region when he had an argument with a customer over payment. A fight broke out which left the other man with partial loss of sight. Puthen Veetil Abdul Latheef Noushad said that he was acting in self defence. He is detained in al-Dammam prison, Dammam.

The government of Kerala & India have entered the fray -

The Keralaites Association, a government agency looking after the welfare of migrants working in the Gulf, has asked the Indian foreign ministry to intervene. [link]

The Indian government has asked Riyadh to pardon an Indian worker whose eye is set to be gouged out as punishment by a Saudi Arabian court, a minister told parliament on Thursday.

“India has sent a mercy petition to Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and to the governor of Dammam, where worker Puthen Veetil Abdul Latheef Noushad is imprisoned,” junior foreign minister E Ahamed told parliament. [link]

Noushad’s last remaining hope is an official pardon from the Saudi Royal’s -

The only option for the Noushad family now is to appeal to the Saudi king for royal clemency, which is granted during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Saudi Arabia acceded to the Convention against Torture in 1997. However, Noushads case is the third known instance over the past year in which a Saudi court has issued a sentence of eye-gouging, Human Rights Watch said.

Sepia Mutiny’s been following the issue with many posts on the subject (indexed on Manish’s Syriana post). In recent years, the crap these workers endure has been slowly making its way into the spotlight and with luck, Noushad’s fate is hopefully more promising than it might have been not too long ago.

My roommate just brought in the paper and exclaimed, “LOOK!”. I thought I was going to see a picture of an adorable little angel in some DC-area Christmas pageant, a put-upon dog wearing antlers or Santa water-skiing on the Potomac…what landed in my lap was a lot cooler (and way unexpected). I knew Redskins mania had been taking over my city, and NFL fans are a devoted lot, but I think it’s extra cute to sport Redskins Red this way. :)

After posting this a few minutes ago, I thought, “I’ll bet someone sent this in as a tip”. Ah, but you readers never disappoint. A full hour ago, AM wrote:

The print edition of the post features a big photo from the redskins game yesterday showing Santana Moss after leaping into the stands - nearly in the center of the picture is a man in a sporty burgundy dastar. I was at the game as well and was impressed by the variety of fans - no longer the homogeneous crowd of the early years of the NFL.

I’m impressed, too. But I’m still a Niners girl, now and always. ;)

(via Little Green Footballs) Now you can devote an entire blog to the depressing topic of modern day honor killings in the Pakistani hinterlands. In fact, LGF sorta fills this role. But this killing was particularly gruesome and makes me damn thankful on this Christmas eve for the society we’ve been blessed to have been born within -

MULTAN, Pakistan - A father angry that his eldest daughter married for love slit her throat as she slept, then killed three other daughters in a remote village in eastern Pakistan, police said Saturday. Nazir Ahmad, a laborer in his 40s, feared the younger girls, aged 4 to 12, would follow in their 25-year-old sister’s footsteps, police officer Shahzad Gul said.

There’s a sort of North Korean / Nazi / Stalinist sense of justice here - you don’t just bring down the perp but his / her family too. Not only to stomp out the meme but also to ensure that any future individuals are thoroughly disincentivized. Fascism comes in forms big and small.

Eleven Indian politicians were thrown out of Parliament yesterday over the Questiongate scandal, only the second time that any parliamentarian has been stripped of his or her post for being corrupt.

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

Ten Lok Sabha members and one from the Rajya Sabha were expelled at the end of a long debate on the five-member probe committee’s report recommending expulsion. [Link]

It is the first time since 1951 that any MP has been expelled for corruption and the biggest single expulsion ever. [Link]

The prime minister also weighed in:

“At no cost should we allow Parliament’s image to be tarnished,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said while speaking in the upper house. [Link]

Cobra Post and Aaj Tak carry on Tehelka’s fine muckraking tradition. Predictably, the BJP, which took the brunt of the demotions, focused its fire on the messengers:

Lal Krishna Advani, the leader of the Opposition, summed up the BJP’s mood. “It was stupidity more than corruption that is the issue. The MPs fell for the lure of money…” During today’s debate, many of them targeted the media and called for legislation to rein in the electronic media. [Link]

To the corrupt politicans I say:

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is, “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.” But only slightly less well-known is this: “Never go in against Sepia Mutiny of Britain when page rank is on the line.” [Link]

Related posts: The cultural implications of Questiongate (updated), The Mutiny claims its first victims

‘Twas the night before Christmas,
And all through the house
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a mouse…

All along, I thought desis were good at forming cliques. Actually, it turns out they’re good at click farming — hiring people to click ads on your own Web site to earn pay-per-click payments fraudulently.

The Jan. 2006 issue of Wired mentions this widely-disseminated ToI scare story from last year:

With her baby on her lap, Maya Sharma (name changed) gets down to work every evening from her eighth-floor flat at Vasant Vihar [in New Delhi]. Maya’s job is to click on online advertisements. She doesn’t care about the ads, but diligently keeps count — it’s $0.18 to $0.25 per click.

A growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across metropolitan cities are rushing to click paid Internet ads to make $100 to $200 (up to Rs 9,000) per month… “It’s boring, but it is extra money for a couple of hours of clicking weblinks every day…” [Link]

Because search engines make their money whether the clicks are from legitimate customers or from scammers, they are only weakly incentivized to prevent the fraud. Those being ripped off: the small businesses who advertise.

Clicks are bought to boost number of hits for web ads or online advertisers who are not tracking user location. [Link]

Users are careful to avoid triggering anti-fraud algorithms by not clicking too often:

“I have no interest in what appears when clicking an ad. I care only whether to pause 60 seconds or 90 seconds, as money is credited if you stay online for a fixed time,” says another user. [Link]

Similarly, spammers are using image captcha farms in India — hiring people to enter the anti-spam picture codes which Web sites require to prove that you’re not a spammer.

Against this backdrop of outright theft, gold farming starts looking legitimate.

Related posts: Why isn’t gold farming big in India?, With a little help from my friends

This morning, NPR’s weekly segment on the StoryCorps Project, featured a Sri Lankan couple speaking about the tsunami. I woke up to it and got a little misty eyed by the chemistry between the two (and the fact that their names rhyme).

As we approach the tsunami’s one-year anniversary, we bring you an interview between husband and wife Prianga and Eranga Pieris.

The couple, who currently live in New York, are originally from Sri Lanka, where more than 35,000 people died in the disaster.

They sing a song that Prianga wrote in honor of the sea and their beloved homeland. It tells the story of a fisherman — and the woman who loves him.

The parade continues. The U.S. News and World Report details the latest warrant-less activity by the U.S. government [via The Huffington Post]:

In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts…

Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree. News of the program comes in the wake of revelations last week that, after 9/11, the Bush White House approved electronic surveillance of U.S. targets by the National Security Agency without court orders. These and other developments suggest that the federal government’s domestic spying programs since 9/11 have been far broader than previously thought. [Link]

I am glad that the Feds are protecting against a nuclear threat in the D.C. area where my family lives. BUT, why can’t they just get a warrant so that it’s all legit?

At its peak, they say, the effort involved three vehicles in Washington, D.C., monitoring 120 sites per day, nearly all of them Muslim targets drawn up by the FBI. For some ten months, officials conducted daily monitoring, and they have resumed daily checks during periods of high threat. The program has also operated in at least five other cities when threat levels there have risen: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle.

Does the Bush Administration have any legal precedent on their side to conduct this type of activity?

[Georgetown University Professor David] Cole points to a 2001 Supreme Court decision, U.S. vs. Kyllo, which looked at police use — without a search warrant — of thermal imaging technology to search for marijuana-growing lamps in a home. The court, in a ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled that authorities did in fact need a warrant — that the heat sensors violated the Fourth Amendment’s clause against unreasonable search and seizure.

When it comes to a nuclear threat I am all for aggressive policing. In light of this weeks revelations though, this seems to be just another power grab by the Executive Branch.

A Sikh, a Sri Lankan and a regular Joginder walk into a Whole Foods café. Cicatrix has her hair blown straight and at this very moment can pass for brown Japanese. I’m sometimes confused with Latino. But Ennis the turbaned Sikh? People recognize. There’s no mistaking where he’s from.

Ennis makes a food run downstairs. Here’s what he hears in the sushi line: ‘Sat sri akal, sardarji!’ It’s coming from the chefs rolling seaweed serpents behind a chic bar. They’re actually Tibetan, not Japanese. They say they get hired to work the sushi counter because ‘assi chinki lagde ne’ (we look East Asian).

So Punjabi-speaking Tibetans pass for Japanese by resembling the Chinese because it fools Americans. It’s like Sepia-ites inventing black ancestry to win street cred in North Dakota

The conversation turns to accused shooter Biswanath Halder, a longtime ranter on Usenet (one prescient 1993 reply was titled ‘Mr. Biswanath Halder, please calm down’). There’s disbelief over the mechanics of the rampage. I explain that a thousand rounds don’t take much space at all. Ten small boxes, neatly packed as chocolates. The turbaned man looks worried and says, ‘Keep your voice down.’ It’s just a Sri Lankan, a turbaned guy and a pajamahedeen shootin’ the shit, saying things now off-limits to brown people in public.

Related posts: Indian enough, The talented Mr. Rupinder, Shazia Deen / Dancing Queen

And you. And you. And definitely YOU. Those of you who’ve viewed 2003’s sublime “Love Actually” will know exactly who I’m imitating, as I inaugurate this week’s nanofiction orgy.

Speaking of imitation, I’m still marinating in the afterglow of last week’s tryst with wit and creativity, when you, ahem, “emulated” other sepiates. One of you made me laugh out loud, the first time a bit of flash fiction has ever accomplished THAT rare result. Which one of you, you wonder? Why, a lady never tells. ;)

I will let you know that it was one of the three outstanding flashes of fiction below:

I have just completed downloading all the Sepia RSS feeds from past Nano-55 orgies into a central database. Upon regressing the frequency of posting comments/nano-fiction against Anna’s time-to-post (measured in hours-past-Friday-00hrs), it can be easily seen that as winter progresses, Anna feels like staying in bed longer, confirming our genetic propensity to hibernate. [DDiA]

Now, I think you’ll find I explained this in my articles on Sulekha HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE. It seems clear to me that poor, working class people should really stop complaining. If they can’t work their way out of poverty, expel them from these compassionate American shores! They should learn from Hindus. [Bongsie]

I was with my girlfriend last night (stop sniggering), and we were chatting about whether certain desi morsels (cut it out) translate effectively to a Western audience. For example, do people like their lassi “sweet” or “salty” (careful now); or, if paan went mainstream, if they would prefer to spit or swallow after they’d finished. [Jai Singh]

Brilliant. :)

This week? Get in the Chrismukkah spirit, whatever that means to you. To me, it means wishing you tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy, ohhhhh ti-i-dings of commmmmfort…and joy. Quite predictably, you’ll bring me enormous amounts of joy simply by leaving 55 words of fiction or links to it in the comments below.

Merry everything, y’all, and to y’all a good night. :)

India Abroad recently held a gala banquet where it announced the magazine’s pick for “Person of the Year.” The event featured live taped messages from President Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Rediff.com, which owns India Abroad, reports:

Special messages from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George Bush were the highlight of the India Abroad annual awards conferred at a gala banquet at the Hotel New York Palace, which was attended by nearly 300 guests, on Friday.

Relations between the United States and India, on the ascendant for a few years but which soared since the July 28 Summit between President George Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Washington, DC, was picked for the India Abroad Event of the Year 2005 award.

In a specially videographed message for the occasion, Prime Minister Singh lauded the Indian American community for the enhancement in relations between the two nations, spoke warmly of his July summit with President Bush, and singled out India Abroad — the oldest, and largest selling weekly Indian newspaper in the United States - for its contribution to furthering Indo-US ties.

Oh wait. You guys want to know who the Person of the Year was, right? It was the Purple-fingered one himself. Good ole’ Bobby Jindal. Bobby has been very busy of late and keeps getting busier by the day. It was just announced that he will accompany Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert on a trip to India. Dennis needed a local who could translate and was familiar with the ways of the Indians. I’m only kidding.

US House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert and Indian American Congressman Bobby Jindal will visit India in January ahead of President George W Bush’s scheduled trip.

A visit by Hastert signifies the importance Congress attaches to the July 18 agreement between Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, charting a strategic cooperation between the two democracies, including in the critical field of civilian nuclear technology…

Hastert, who is the third highest ranking official in the American government hierarchy, will be visiting India with Representative Jindal (Republican-Louisiana), who became the first Indian American to win a Congressional seat in 46 years after his victory in November 2004.

”And that itself is an indication of the rising importance of India, that the speaker of the House will be visiting India,” Representative Joe Wilson, Republican from South Carolina said. [Link]

The biggest legal news of the week was a decision yesterday by Judge Michael Luttig of the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. The Fourth is considered the most conservative of the Court of Appeals, and Luttig the most conservative of judges. He makes Roberts and Alito look liberal, which is why the President thought it would be too hard to get him confirmed to the Supreme Court. It must have thus shocked the Bush administration that he sharply rebuked their handling of the Padilla case. If you’ll recall, over three years ago the government accused American CITIZEN Jose Padilla of being a potential “dirty bomber.” He was stripped of his rights as a citizen under the U.S. Constitution and was thrown into jail as an enemy combatant based upon the secret evidence of the Administration. The assertion was that he had no rights. His lawyer, Andrew Patel, appealed his status and it was headed for the Supreme Court after a brief layover in the Fourth. At this point (over three years into the ordeal) the government changed its mind. To paraphrase the Justice Department’s logic, “let’s just change his status and charge him with other crimes so that the existing case cannot be appealed to the Supreme Court.” Not so fast, said Luttig. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

The administration’s actions create “an appearance that the government may be attempting to avoid consideration of our decision [in the Padilla case] by the Supreme Court,” writes Judge J. Michael Luttig in a 13-page order released on Wednesday.

“We believe that the issue [in Padilla’s case] is of sufficient national importance as to warrant consideration by the Supreme Court,” Judge Luttig writes.

The judge went on to criticize the government for underestimating the damage its actions were causing to public perceptions of the war on terror and the government’s credibility before the courts.

“While there could be an objective that could command such a price as all this, it is difficult to imagine what that objective might be,” Luttig writes.

The rebuke carries extra sting, analysts say, because of who delivered it. Luttig is one of the nation’s most conservative appeals court judges and was on the short list of White House favorites for each of the two recent vacancies on the Supreme Court.

It has been a real bad week for Civil Libertarians, hasn’t it? It seems that every time I turn on the television there is news of one of my Constitutional rights is being eroded. Earlier this week Newsweek asked, “why have [Americans] reacted so insipidly to yet another post-9/11 erosion of U.S. civil liberties?” This question was posed in reference to the revelation of illegal wiretaps. I point this out because these two issues are inextricably linked. A U.S. citizen who is spied upon without a warrant can then be labeled an enemy combatant and locked up without any rights, all on the word of the Bush Administration. Why then are they jonesing so bad for a Patriot Act renewal? This method is way more powerful.

An Air India flight Monday from L.A. to Delhi turned into a comedy of errors which delayed the passengers by two whole days (thanks, Saheli). First day, a tire blew out on takeoff:

As the plane took off, Gursharan said, it shook after a tire burst, startling passengers. The Boeing 747-400 flew over the ocean and circled, dumped fuel and then returned for a bumpy emergency landing. The landing gear dug into the runway, leaving a 7,000-foot-long field of debris that took 40 employees hours to clean up… [Link]

And the Concorde proved that runway debris is murderous.

… the teenager and his family turned on the news to see footage of their plane landing amid a shower of sparks… Airport officials said the pilots made a wise choice to take off, explaining that, if they had aborted, they might not have had enough runway to stop the heavy, fully fueled aircraft. [Link]

Next day, different plane, an engine problem led to a minor passenger revolt:

Flight 136 pushed back from the gate… 2 1/2 hours late… one of the four engines was malfunctioning… the flight crew didn’t provide more detailed information, passengers said, leaving them trapped on the packed jumbo jet for about five hours… Finally, Wenz, the professor, said he just walked through a door that attendants had opened. He climbed down the stairs and off the plane to wait on the tarmac. Other passengers, he said, followed. [Link]

Taking a Delhi-to-Chennai train would’ve been faster than this flight. Last year, an Air India crew forgot to drop landing gear. So if you’re flying Air India, here’s a cheery thought: it may not be Jet Airways, but it sure beats Aeroflot.

Related posts: Air India more efficient than ever, Open skies and Air India

Women from the Nicobar Islands have came up with a creative hack for feminine products handed out by Westerners:

Global NGOs brought in thousands of packets of sanitary napkins and distributed them to the Nicobarese tribal women this year. “Our women don’t use sanitary napkins, so they first used them as toilet paper because there was a water crisis in the islands. Then they made pillows out of them…” [Link]

But cultural misunderstandings can cut both ways. I wonder what NGO women think Indian-style pillows are for:

Author Pankaj Mishra read a hilarious snippet of his memoir Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India at the SAJA litfest earlier this year.

Tenzing Tsundue, Tibetan dissident

In the early 70’s, Norbu was among the young Tibetans who dropped out of school, picked up a rifle and joined the Tibetan guerrillas operating out of Mustang, a piece of Nepalese territory that juts into Tibet. The C.I.A. began financing these guerrillas in 1956 and arranged for more than a hundred of them to be trained in the Colorado Rockies in what was one of the most secret anti-Communist operations of the cold war.

In 1958, the C.I.A. first airdropped arms, ammunition, radios and medical supplies into Tibet. Three years later, Tibetan guerrillas based in Mustang ambushed a Chinese military convoy inside Tibet and captured documents that revealed the low capacity and morale of the Chinese military. This turned out to be one of the C.I.A.’s most valuable intelligence hauls during the cold war.

American support for the Tibetans, however, was halfhearted at best, designed to undermine Communist China, not to achieve Tibetan independence. It began to peter out by the late 60’s and finally dried up altogether in the early 70’s, after Kissinger and Nixon befriended Mao. Then in 1994, much to the dismay of many Tibetans, Bill Clinton uncoupled trade agreements with China from the problematic issue of human rights.

In NYC today:

When traffic gets tough, the tough take a rickshaw. Some things never change.

The Kali Cow and the Trinidadian ‘Saint dance their dance of destruction. Meanwhile, the walk to the gym turned out to be an hour (the NYC weight loss special!), and cab fare home is up 70%. A Bangladeshi brutha told me traffic turned 10-minute rides into 40, so the city jacked up rates to ensure cabbies turn up for work.

He seemed plenty cheerful to me as he palmed my Andrew Jackson.

Related post: Trainspotting

We are sad to report (thanks for the tip Yasmine) that Dr. Zehra Attari’s body has been found. It doesn’t appear to have been foul play, just foul weather that is to blame. America’s Most Wanted reports:

After a six-week search, Dr. Zehra Attari’s body was found in her car at the bottom of the Oakland Estuary in Almeda, Calif.

Divers at the Grand Street pier on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2005 located a car matching the description of Attari’s 2001 gray Honda Accord. After lifting the car from the murky water, police discovered the doctor’s body…

According to police and residents, the road on which Attari was traveling is deadly — no barrier between the street and the water exists. They say it is likely that someone who didn’t know the area could drive off the pier and into the water unknowingly. [Link]

This is kind of scary because I think it may remind many of us about our own mothers. Her family describes her as being an under-confident driver and easily disoriented when traveling new routes. I know this description fits my own mother when she is faced with highway driving.

Attari was not far from her destination that evening on Nov. 7. A right turn onto Otis Drive would have set her back on track. Instead, Attari made a left. When she finally made a right a few blocks down, it was onto Grand Street.

While Grand Street is not exactly a road to nowhere, it is a road that leads directly into the cold black waters of the Oakland estuary. That is where Attari’s journey ended. [Link]

See previous posts [1,2]

Updated: A reader sends us the video. It’s just like Jerry Springer!

Normally I don’t like featuring “odd-ball” stories from the subcontinent, but this one was really unusual in my opinion. We all know that in certain parts of the world, including India, public displays of affection are frowned upon. In many cases the authorities decide to arrest, punish, or otherwise chastise amorous couples who are getting their groove on in public. This however, is the first time that I have read about women in authority doing the heavy handed punishing. The BBC reports:

Two policewomen have been suspended in the northern Indian city of Meerut for slapping and punching couples who were dating in a public park.

Police were carrying out “Operation Romeo,” which they said was to target the sexual harassment of women.

Anti-police protests erupted after TV pictures showed officers punching and pulling the hair of young women.

Police chief Rajiv Ranjan said the drive was to tackle obscenity but the officers had “clearly gone overboard.”

I don’t get it. You would think that as women they would be more sympathetic to women, especially if their intent was to prevent sexual harassment as they claim. Yet apparently the girl always gets the blame no matter the gender of the authority figure. I’m wondering if perhaps these policewomen were a bit bitter about their own romantic fortunes and simply releasing their frustration.

[The chief] said the police action was part of a drive undertaken at periodic intervals - often at the behest of the parents of young women - to “cleanse” parks and other public places of people indulging in acts of public obscenity.

But he made it clear that there was no law which banned men and women walking together in public places or sitting in a park.

He said police personnel had no business bothering, let alone beating up, couples sitting together in public.

My posts today have featured two particularly gruesome subjects. Since I am on a roll, I thought why not try for a hat trick? Bill O’Reilly, the resident jingo at that “Fair and Balanced” news organization is at it again. A few weeks back he encouraged Al Qaeda to lay waste to San Francisco. Recently he has created his own media blacklist, sort of like Oprah’s book club, except what NOT to read. SM reader “Mephistopheles1981” informs us that Bill has most recently decided to take Circuit City and its “Indian owners” to task for not sharing in the Christmas spirit. He is sick and tired of all these secular stores that take advantage of Christmas giving, without acknowledging it. Only one problem. Circuit City isn’t owned by Indians. Media Matters for America reports:

O’REILLY: Yeah, Target’s changed its policy. And we appreciate that.

CALLER: That’s fantastic. So, I hope now you can do something about Circuit City. I was in there last week —

O’REILLY: [Laughing] Circuit City —

CALLER: — and —

O’REILLY: I think people from India own Circuit City. I think that’s the problem there.

O’REILLY: I can’t — I can’t do — I can’t do everybody. I’m trying to do the big ones that are all over the place. Yeah, look, you know — but again if you go into any retail store and you’re buying a Christmas present and they refuse to acknowledge Christmas, you know what I’m going to do. You know what E.D.’s going to do —

…Contrary to O’Reilly’s ownership theory, none of the major, direct, institutional, or mutual fund holders of the publicly traded company is Indian. The same appears to be true of the company’s senior management and its board of directors. In addition, the retailer limits its business to the United States and Canada.

It’s not just what he says. Click on the audio file to listen to how he says it. Tell me his voice isn’t lined with a tinge of bigotry. Oh please, oh please can we end up on his blacklist? We are Indian owned. I’d rather be on Oprah’s list but we got no shot at that.

I really wanted to write a post about the U.S. Federal Court slapping down “Intelligent Design” in Dover, Pennsylvania today:

A federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled today that it is unconstitutional to compel teachers there to present “intelligent design” as an alternative explanation to evolution because it amounts to establishing religion in public schools.

I couldn’t find a strong Desi-angle beyond what we’ve already blogged about though. So instead, I’ve decided to write a post about “Un-intelligent Design.” Most people know that Hitler’s Third Reich was fascinated by the occult and was always looking for mystical weapons and methods in order to defeat the Allies. Essentially, that is what the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark is about. He is also thought to have been fascinated by Eastern religions. After reading the following article out today in the Scotsman, I wondered if the brutal dictator Joseph Stalin might have been reading up on his Hindu mythology when he came up with this VERY unintelligent design idea:

The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior…

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat…”

Mr Ivanov’s experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail. [Link]

Sick, sick, sick. Nothing is going to convince me that they were really “volunteers.” I wondered if Stalin may have been inspired by Hanuman’s story. He is after all the mightiest of warriors and proved himself during the Ramayana War. He was conceived more naturally…well sort of.

Last week Bong Breaker contended that if there is a post on Sepia Mutiny about “Raw meat” then chances are that it may be one written by me. I hate to be predictable but I hate to disappoint even more. An SM tipster sends us the following article about cannibalism in India from Student Newspaper.org:

As we shared a bumpy auto-rickshaw journey between two North Indian villages, I began to realise that the frail old man I was rubbing thighs with was in fact a cannibal who claimed that babies taste “fresh” whereas the corpses of older people have a “stringy texture like wood”. Gary Stevenson (the name he used to introduce himself) then proceeded to illustrate and justify his preference for younger human flesh through the comparison of superior-tasting lamb over mutton…

Once we were sitting comfortably, Stevenson eagerly whipped out the skull of a young girl that he “dragged out of the Ganges” and carries with him at all times, proudly stroking the smooth bone and proclaiming the cranium to be the finest from his expansive collection. Licking his lips, my congenial cannibal enthusiastically described the sensation of eating his own species: “Human flesh smells like rawhide and tastes like pork. The fingers are the most succulent part,” declaring the practice of devouring corpse meat to be a sacred primordial ritual which still occurs amongst radical Hindu Aghoris in certain parts of India.

Houston-born Stevenson [a.k.a. Kapal Nath], who has come to be known as the “American Aghori”, told me of how he has roamed India for years in search of enlightenment, feasting on the remains of the Hindu dead “as often as possible…” [Link]

I didn’t know that there were any Hindu cannibals. It seems like such a contradiction in terms at its face. At first the only thing I could find was that National Geographic once featured a segment about them and that Wikipedia has a short entry about their ways:

A sect who them selves relates to the order of lord Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. Aghori means non-terrifying in Sanskrit. The sect is peculiar with its rituals and way of life. This extremely shy and secretive community is known to live in the graveyards, wearing the ash from the pyre, use human bone from the graveyards for the rituals.

The sect dates back to around 1000 A.D., and practices cannibalism in the belief that eating human flesh confers spiritual and physical benefits, such as prevention of aging.

NYC subway workers have just gone on strike for the first time in 25 years and only the third time ever. Many, many desis were on both sides of these negotiations. Everyone has been glued to the TV sets at the gym for the last few days. Asking random strangers about strike status is as commonplace as asking for The Score when the Yankees are in the World Series.

Coming home from the city tonight, fellow passengers were sharing gossip about whether trains turned into pumpkins after the strike deadline at midnight. We buttonholed the conductors of passing trains. None of them knew any more than we did. Boarding the train, we knew that we could be kicked off at any stop and be forced to walk the rest of the way home. The atmosphere was a little bit like the East Coast blackout, but with less promise of impromptu rooftop parties followed by a baby boom.

Along with thousands of others, I’ll be walking across the Williamsburg Bridge today to get to my beloved gym and bookstore, suffering little inconvenience other than a warmly bundled, 40-minute walk in 23 degree weather. Meanwhile, millions of workers will be showing up at friends’ houses at 6 am to share rides to work. Large swaths of the island are now off-limits to cars with less than four riders or an equivalent number of convincing mannequins. Those who toil at large companies will expense cab rides and hotel rooms; those who don’t will take over the couches of friends in the city. There will be a run on bicycles.

The greatest ill effects, of course, will be suffered by two very different groups: emergency victims stuck in life-threatening traffic jams, and transit workers themselves, who will be docked both pay and penalties for every day of the strike. It seems almost ungracious to mention that a subway strike the week before Christmas will slam retailers in what’s normally the most profitable week of the year.

A while ago we blogged about this picture of Vishwanath Anand and model Carmen Kass playing chess.

While calling for caption nominations for this photo, Ennis suggested “Beauty and the Geek.” That desi men are portrayed as geeks/dorks/nerds isn’t a surprise. Afterall, there are many of us that possess a high degree of intellect, but lack an equal level of social grace. This often makes mingling with members of the opposite sex, or anyone for that matter, quite difficult and awkward. It seems that Ashton Kutcher and his Punk’d buddy and co-creator Adam Goldberg are playing on this stereotype in the second season of their apparently successful, and aptly titled reality show, “Beauty and the Geek,” which airs on the WB. The new season, which will begin airing at 9 pm, on Thursday January 12, apparently features a sepia geek, Ankur, an MIT graduate and his sex-kitten-partner Jennipher, who while learning the various ways one can spell Jennifer, spends her time as a camp counselor.

To shave or not to shave, that is the question.

This is my last guest post for Sepia Mutiny, and I want to thank all the bloggers and readers here for their interest, comments and links.

Since I was invited to do this, I meant to write a post about cashews in an okra curry. I had this dish at a wedding reception during Thanksgiving break, and the table of the kids with whom I’d grown up thought it was tasty but not exactly home cooking. My little sister wanted to rebut this presumption; just because we didn’t recognize it, she argued, was no reason to assume that it was not Telegu, or not South Indian. Non-Indians seem to find these distinctions amusing and/or confusing. A white friend of mine is dating a Tamil Brahmin and I’m still trying to make him grasp that everything from her religious practices to her food preparation will be different from my family’s traditions. Still, these can be difficult to map out, literally: when I recognize that “we” do something that other people don’t, does that mean that the something is Indian, Southie, Telegu or just us?

Wired says a real-life Constant Gardener scenario has just begun playing out in India. New rules against generic knockoffs of Western drugs have emboldened pharmaceutical companies to use India’s poor as cheap drug testing guinea pigs (via Slashdot):

… multinational corporations are riding high on the trend toward globalization by taking advantage of India’s educated work force and deep poverty to turn South Asia into the world’s largest clinical-testing petri dish… trials account for more than 40 percent of drug-development costs. The study also found that performing the studies in India can bring the price down by about 60 percent…

… in March, everything changed when India submitted to pressure from the World Trade Organization to stop the practice and implement rules that prohibit local companies from creating generic versions of patented drugs…. the number of studies conducted by multinational drug companies has sharply increased since March. [Link]

There are attractions other than low cost:

“Doctors are easier to recruit for trials because they don’t have to go through the same ethics procedures as their Western colleagues,” Ecks said. “And patients ask fewer questions about what is going on… ” Companies are attracted to India not only because of the huge patient pool and skilled workers, but also because many potential study volunteers are “treatment naïve,” meaning they have not been exposed to the wide array of biomedical drugs that most Western patients have… [Link]

Ethical shenanigans aren’t restricted to just Western pharmas:

In 2004, two India-based pharmaceutical companies, Shantha Biotech in Hyderabad and Biocon in Bangalore, came under scrutiny for conducting illegal clinical trials that led to eight deaths. Shantha Biotech failed to obtain proper consent from patients while testing a drug meant to treat heart attacks. Biocon tested a genetically modified form of insulin without the proper approval from the Drug Controller General of India or the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee. [Link]

The saddest thing is that if the drugs work, the testers are unlikely to even have access to the drugs:

Since many pharmaceutical companies are developing the drugs for markets in industrialized nations, it is unlikely that India’s poor will have access to most of the new medicine. [Link]

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria is a favorite subject on Sepia Mutiny and the man is rapidly achieving prominence as one of the top foreign policy pundits in the World (desi or otherwise). Surfing around, I came across a pretty interesting profile of Zakaria in NY Metro magazine from back in April of 2003.

Of particular interest was the Desi-inspired origin of Zakaria’s politics (views which apparently run against the “prescribed’ Asian American grain) -

Zakaria became a conservative, he says, from observing the Indian state. “People often say, ‘How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?’ Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don’t understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed.

“The second,” he continues, “is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of pre-industrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.”

Few examples out there demonstrate the degree to which certain high minded political ideals can utterly fail to mesh with reality than the lost 40 years of post-independence Indian development.

Fareed has raised the ire of many desi liberals (check out the comments on this thread, for ex) for, among other things, his (equivocal) support of the polarizing Iraq war. Serious detractors may attack his conclusions but most acknowledge the intellectual weight of his arguments (well, with the exception of anonymous ones who dismiss him as an “Uncle Tom”)

For more of Fareed’s musings, his eponymous website can be found here. SM’ers might be interested in a summary / review of his book The Future of Freedom on my personal blog here.

While writing my last post, I ran across an article about trying to reduce the number of families who had their daughters become devadasis. I was fairly sure that I knew what that meant, but Googled for confirmation and thus saw this NOT SAFE FOR WORK site, which was the third hit. Abhi blogged about it previously here.

I don’t want to be putting down someone whose circumstances and mindset I’m only gleaning from a website, but for a devadasi to operate for personal profit seems rather irregular. I suppose this independence removes it from the most objectionable aspects of the “traditional” devadasi system as still practiced today. Yet to be doing it so differently while working under the same name worries me, because that kind of definitional blurring often works to bury the problematic actions under the newly legitimized ones. Kama dismisses the question of why she isn’t working in a temple with “For many years it has been illegal to leave girls in the temple because of the many problems that have become associated with the poverty and exploitation of many Devadasi.” This answer seems to minimize the inherent problems of temple prostitution.

A conservative friend and I spotted the Onion’s headline “Activist Judge Cancels Christmas,” and — unsurprisingly for all of you who have put up with my ranting on this subject — proceeded to have a disagreement. He predicted that there would be an instance of “life imitating art,” and I found the notion of a judge’s interfering with non-governmental celebration of Christmas as ridiculous as the Onion did. (The parody is not about state-sponsored Nativity scenes, which are likely to be found unconstitutional.) I said that I wouldn’t want the government to attempt to represent Hinduism, as they’d probably make as much a muck of it as non-Hindu retailers do, and continued to be puzzled as to why Christians and the occasional Jew did. He replied that this was only because I was living in a country where the government was unlikely to do such a thing, and that I’d be less likely to protest it in India.

My understanding was that India’s Constitution had requirements similar to those of the U.S. First Amendment, requiring that the government neither establish religion nor constrain the exercise of it. But a closer look shows that in this, as with so many things, the American Founders valued brevity over the locquacious explanation dear to desi hearts, and I hope that some Mutineers can help me understand how the difference works out in practice.

Here’s a Dutch photo project posing members of subcultures (rockers, surfers, ‘ecofreaks’ and so on) in similar clothes:

“By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity…” [Link]

The project includes desi women in Rotterdam:

When desis finally get their own high school clique name, it’ll be in some flick called Pretty in Pink, Orange, Red, Purple and Blue, and the name won’t be as lame as the ‘Massalas.’

On the other hand, the dike-desi look is similar to the British Asian bird uniform of London circa 2001: hip-huggers and three-quarters length fitted jacket with frock collar. Black.

See the entire photo project here.

Actors have long been reluctant to fess up to their early roles, and one in particular stands out as making minimal use of any actor’s talents: the stiff.

Plan B: a gig as a dead terrorist

Never fear, dear unemployed desi actor. The U.S. military has created a new entry-level role for those of brown persuasion that’s one step up from stiff and one step below TV terrorist: mock jihadi at a military training camp.

The assailants… come in two forms: al-Qaeda terrorists, based in an off-limits bit of the wood called Pakistan, and Taliban insurgents living in 18 mock villages. Another 800 role-players live with them, acting as western aid workers, journalists, peacekeepers, Afghan mayors, mullahs, policemen, doctors and opium farmers, all with fake names, histories and characters. Some 200 bored-looking Afghan-Americans are augmented by local Louisianans in Afghan garb…

… then we blow ourselves up. The first blast, in a yellow flash, lights up a guard-tower and the anxious face of a young GI. The second… is much bigger—a hollow boom and an explosion of orange fire that soars 100 feet into the night sky… “Go tell your buddies, you’re all dead…”

Attacks with simulated roadside bombs (known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs), rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and small arms, using special effects and lasers, are unrelenting… Two Hollywood companies have been hired to improve the army’s flashes and bangs, and to give acting classes to the role-players… [Link]

Sepia Mutiny has been covering the case of Biswanath Halder - a man with an interesting on-line trail - for a few months. In the latest development, while he may be an attempted mass murderer, he’s not quite a terrorist -

A US court has tossed out terrorism charge against an Indian accused of a seven-hour university shooting rampage in 2003, but retained 201 other charges against him, including aggravated murder.

Biswanath Halder’s attack against a “small, random” group of people in Case Western Reserve University’s business school building did not constitute a terrorist attack on the civil population as defined by Ohio law, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Peggy Foley ruled on Wednesday.

If convicted of the aggravated murder charge, 65-year-old Halder, who hails from Kolkata, could get death penalty.

Prosecuting him as a terrorist is a bit extreme although I can see both sides of the case - there’s probably a DA in this mix who’s been instructed to go “Timothy McVeigh” on his ass and throw the book at him - including marginal claims. On the flip side, the defense just gave a basic “c’mon, the dude was acting alone for dubious motives - he’s certainly not Al Qaeda linked.” At the limit, it does raise important questions about when an act is a loony acting on his own and when it’s part of a larger terrorist agenda (I suppose, given the tone of SM of late, that many folks here would argue that “terrorist = brown dude that a white cop / DA doesn’t like.”).

Whatever the case, it’s not like Halder’s getting off scot free although perhaps if he writes a few children’s books he might be more successful at travelling down the Tookie Williams path. And just what set off our 65 yr old defendant?

Halder went to the University’s Business School with more than 1000 rounds of ammunition because he thought that a computer lab employee had hacked into his website which was set up to help people from India form businesses.

1000 rounds - this guy ain’t f*ckin’ around. An hour of solid shooting at the range is probably no more than 200 rounds. Homey was loading up for a 5 hr shootathon. Moral of the story - be careful when you step between a desi dude, his computer, and his business.

I know as I write this that I’m going to be torn a new one in about a second by all the Indier-than-thou-types out there. You know who you are. I don’t care. I am going to just say it and let the chips fall where they may. I am a John Mayer fan. So what. Screw you. He is a massively talented lyricist and an even better guitar player. Unfortunately he is judged mostly upon his screaming girlie fans and that fact that he has a reputation of being a womanizer. Now that we’ve gotten past all that, what I really wanted to mention is that Mayer and Esquire magazine held a contest earlier this year (thanks for the tip Amit). In his own words:

I keep a note that I wrote on a taxi receipt
It says, “Don’t listen to anybody other than me”
I hit the big time for a nominal fee
You lose a friend in the end for every dream that you see come true

I got scars upon scrapes, I’ve got bruises on breaks
Masochistically committed to see how much of this I’ll take
Three years under water, and I ain’t even got the shakes
I’m going deeper and deeper and deeper

I’ve got dreams to remember, I’ve got days to forget
I’ve got some phone calls in to God but he ain’t called me back just yet

I’m still not done with these lyrics. But I don’t want to let them sit idly on my mind’s shelf. So here’s my offer: I’m inviting all aspiring songwriters to write their own chords and melodies around my lyrics. Go ahead, I’m not using them. You can tell people that we wrote a song together. I want to hear what you come up with, so send a CD of your song to the address listed below. The best submissions will be featured here on Esquire.com.

Well, one of the finalists that molded these lyrics into her own was a woman from Mumbai with great voice named Sonal D’Silva. Listen to her take.

Unlike much of the public I really do listen to what critics say before I go to see a movie. I especially like Kenneth Turan and Joe Morgenstern who lend their critiques to NPR every week. Some of their best reviewed films happen to be ones you’ve never heard of, but will be sorry if you miss. It comes as no surprise that many of these movies don’t make a lot at the box office. As the number of crappy films that do make it to the screen increase every year, resulting in fewer people going out to see movies, studio executives need some sort of crystal ball or…formula to know which films they should greenlight for maximum profitability. Enter Professor Ramesh Sharda of Oklahoma State University. MSNBC reports:

A scientist in the United States says he has come up with a computer program that helps predict whether a film will be a hit or a miss at the box office long before it is even made.

“Our goal is to try to find oil, in a way,” Professor Ramesh Sharda of the Oklahoma State University said Wednesday.

“We are trying to forecast the success of a movie based on things that are decided before a movie has been made,” he told Reuters by telephone.

Yes. That’s exactly what Hollywood needs. More formulaic movies. It’s even more discouraging when you see the variables that Sharda finds will maximize studio profits. Some of them are things that cause me to shy away from a movie:

Sharda applied seven criteria to each movie: its rating by censors, competition from other films at the time of release, strength of the cast, genre, special effects, whether it is a sequel and the number of theaters it opens in.

Using a neural network to process the results, the films are placed in one of nine categories, ranging from “flop,” meaning less than $1 million at the box office, to “blockbuster,” meaning more than $200 million.

I wonder what would happen if you started entering Bollywood films into the system. I predict the system would crash.

The system cannot take into account the intricacies of the plot, but Sharda says it can nonetheless get the revenue category spot-on 37 per cent of the time, and correct to within one category either side 75 per cent of the time. This is enough to make the system a “powerful decision aid”, Sharda says. [Link]

Canadian PM Pauljinder Martin pays his respects before a Guru Granth Sahib at a gurdwara (via Ash Singh). I’m not sure of the date on this photo, but his government is facing a new election in January after a loss of confidence vote, so maybe he should’ve stuffed a few more rupees into the donation box

I’m straining in vain to imagine Dubya doing a courtesy bow in front of a Koran or Torah, or a Hindu or Buddhist scripture. If you have a photo, do share.

Are you a traditionally dressed Muslim woman who is simply SICK of being profiled because you choose to cover your head? Are you harassed every time you go to the airport? Well now there is a potential solution to your problems (thanks for tip Vikram). Introducing the Counter-Surveillance Headdress (Click on thumbnails to enlarge):

The purpose of the “Counter-Surveillance Headdress” is to empower the wearer by allowing him/her to claim a moment of privacy.

The design of the headdress borrows from Islamic and Hindu fashion. The reason behind this is to comment on the racial profiling of Arab and Arab-looking citizens that occurred post-9/11. Unfortunately the fear of terrorism led to the targeting of those of non-western decent. Therefore in its design my headdress is a contradiction; meaning although it’s goal is to hide the wearer it would make the wearer a target of heightened surveillance.

The “Counter-Surveillance Headdress” is a laser tikka (forehead ornament) attached to a hooded vest and reflective shawl. The laser is activated by pressing a button enclosed in the left shoulder area of the vest. When pointed directly into a camera lens, the laser creates a burst of light masking the wearer’s face. Additionally the wearer can use the reflective cloth to cover the face and head. The aluminized material protects the wearer by reflecting any infrared radiation and also disguises the wearer by visually reflecting the surroundings, rendering the wearer’s identity anonymous.

Call me crazy but I like the reflective shawl. The woman behind this great idea seems to be one Gloria Sed. Her website contains other examples of utilitarian fasions as well. I know what you are thinking. This could be a great Christmas present.

California, here I come
Right back where I started from [Link]

John Yoo, professor of law at my alma mater, UC Berkeley, became infamous last year for writing a memo justifying torture by the CIA.

As Abhi posted, the NYT just reported that Yoo also wrote a legal opinion claiming Dubya could break U.S. law and let the NSA, a Defense Department agency which intercepts and decrypts overseas sigint, spy domestically on U.S. citizens.

The NSA activities were justified by a classified Justice Department legal opinion authored by John C. Yoo, a former deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel who argued that congressional approval of the war on al Qaeda gave broad authority to the president… That legal argument was similar to another 2002 memo authored primarily by Yoo, which outlined an extremely narrow definition of torture. That opinion, which was signed by another Justice official, was formally disavowed after it was disclosed by the Washington Post. [Link]

On one hand we’ve got Manmohan Singh’s daughter Amrit Singh fighting CIA torture and open-ended detentions in Guantánamo Bay. On the other, we’ve got Professor Yoo on the side of virtually unlimited police powers and Ass’t Attorney General Viet Dinh co-authoring large portions of the Fascist Act.

At first glance, Yoo might seem a political soldier willing to write whatever tissue-thin legal justifications his superiors order. But what if he’s sincere in his belief that torture, locking people up without charge and domestic spying by the NSA is legitimate rather than prima facia illegal and unconstitutional?

Mario Savio

I get the sense that first-gen Asian Americans tend to be socially conservative and more pro-law and order (vs. civil rights and privacy) than the mainstream. It’s the whole idea put forth by GOP recruiters that many first-gen Asian-Americans, including desis, ought to be ‘natural conservatives’ because they tend to hold traditional social views, value family and own small businesses:

Grover Norquist, a Republican anti-tax campaigner with influential friends in the White House, claims that “Indian-Americans are natural Republicans and natural conservatives.” They are on the whole well-educated and well-to-do; they respect family values, and like working for themselves. [Link]

In this case, however, it doesn’t really apply. Yoo was born in Seoul, but he grew up and went to undergrad in the U.S. What’s perhaps most symbolically striking is how involved Asian-Americans are in this administration in crafting key antiterror laws which disproportionately affect minorities. We’ve truly arrived.

Even more ironic, UC Berkeley is best known for its role in the Free Speech Movement. Now one of its most highly-placed professors is working hard to undermine those very same ideals. Mario Savio, meet John Yoo.

Update: The NYT reports Yoo’s conservatism was in fact influenced by his parents’ generation, specifically their revulsion towards North Korea’s communism. It parallels the Reagan conservatism of Cuban-Americans:

By then, Mr. Yoo already thought of himself as solidly conservative. He had grown up with anticommunist parents who left their native South Korea for Philadelphia shortly after Mr. Yoo was born in 1967, and had honed his political views while an undergraduate at Harvard. [Link]

Update 2: (thanks, Siddharth):

Yoo traces his convictions in no small part to his parents, and Ronald Reagan. His father and mother are psychiatrists who grew up in Korea during the Japanese occupation and the Korean War. They emigrated in 1967, when Yoo was 3 months old… Coming of age in an anti-communist household, Yoo said, he associated strong opposition to communist rule with the Republican Party and was himself “attracted to Reagan’s message.” [Link]

Update 3: A review of Yoo’s book in the NY Review of Books.

He was merely a mid-level attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel with little supervisory authority and no power to enforce laws. Yet by all accounts, Yoo had a hand in virtually every major legal decision involving the US response to the attacks of September 11, and at every point, so far as we know, his advice was virtually always the same— the president can do whatever the president wants…

In short, the flexibility Yoo advocates allows the administration to lock up human beings indefinitely without charges or hearings, to subject them to brutally coercive interrogation tactics, to send them to other countries with a record of doing worse, to assassinate persons it describes as the enemy without trial, and to keep the courts from interfering with all such actions. Has such flexibility actually aided the US in dealing with terrorism? In all likelihood, the policies and attitudes Yoo has advanced have made the country less secure. [Link]

Related posts: Hullo. Hullo. Who’s that clicking?, Escape from Draconia, Every little helps, Cabbie hartal in Naya York, Reappeared, Brimful of Amrit, Indian PM’s daughter says Bush personally authorized torture

Dave Sharma is the flame-haired percussionist who gave his dhol a good thrashing nightly by the Bollywood Dreams stage. I later ran into him at the State of Bengal show. He’s got a rep as a bad-ass dholi and also seems like an all-round good guy. (Disclaimer: he’s dating a friend o’ mine.)

Sharma, who’s part Himachal Pradeshi and part white, is a member of Dhol Collective. He sometimes plays with DJ Rekha and Tanuja Desai Hidier’s band. He’s also played at the Brooklyn Museum’s Fourth of July fest and on Sarina Jain’s bhangra aerobics videos.

His college band, The Scholars, toured the country and even did a video for MTV. [Link]

This year, Santa Dave brings New Yorkers a dhol ‘n bass Christmas:

… I’m beyond excited to be part of an extra-special session of DirectDrive, NYC’s longest-running weekly drum n’ bass party… I pack up my records and tablas to throw down the freshest in subcontinental grooves, dubby jungle, fresh dubplates, funky DnB and just generally really hot records alongside DD residents Jaggi and Shichman…

So jump out of midnight mass early and swing down to Rothko; I’m on @ 12:30 for the DJ set, and will be playing tablas alongside Jaggi’s set afterwards.

DIRECT DRIVE PRESENTS: XMAS EVE WITH BOLLYDUB D&B

Schichman spinning liquid beats early
Sharma in the center slot
Jaggi cleaning up, w/ Sharma on tablas

Listen to an audio clip.

A Singapore-based desi art studio is launching four new Indian comic books in India and Southeast Asia (thanks, Rage). The four titles are Bollywood, Mythology, Santa Banta & Trendy and Hawk.

“Focusing on the 25 million strong Indian diaspora, Illustrated Orchids started developing the comics based on Indian characters. Of course there is a huge market at home, but the Indian staying overseas always want to have something which can keep their kids attached to our culture.” [Link]

While the Mythology title looks like a higher-quality, manga-style competitor to Amar Chitra Katha, the Bollycomic looks like Archie come to life. Shah Rukh Khan would be Archie (but not Panjabi), Rani Mukherjee is Betty, Aishwarya Rai is Veronica, Aamir Khan is Jughead and plug-haired Salman Khan is definitely Reggie.

A lot of lame Sikh jokes revolve around Santa and Banta Singh, so it’s a bit surprising to see a sardar involved with that title.

More art after the jump.

I am very paranoid when on the phone. I always listen for the little clicks and clacks. I have nothing to hide but my parents think that blogging will draw unnecessary attention to me. Perhaps they are right. I know that when I speak to Manish on the phone about some blog-related matter I should not be using the word “mutiny.” After a while though you just become complacent and let words like “mutiny” and phrases like “overthrow the establishment” drip from your mouth like honey into a cup of green tea. I’ve also been using a calling card (from what may be a shady NSA front company) to call my parents who are vacationing in India. I should think twice about what I say because the big news of the day is that the New York Times is confirming what many of us already suspected. Big Brother might be listening to your mutinous conversations. He can hear you.

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

“This is really a sea change,” said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. “It’s almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches.”

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

As I sniffle, sneeze and snuffle while unlocking the venue for our weekly nanofiction orgy, I find myself feeling mildly guilty for posting this six hours later than I usually do. I know readers on my home coast (where it is barely 6am) aren’t bothered by such tardiness, but mutineers here…well, sorrrrry.

While I normally choose a theme on my own, this week I had some help from co-blogger/fellow Colonial Sajit and a few of the readers who commented on one of his posts, which expressed how describing any brown art with desi spices was gag-worthy.

I must say, whatever resistance I had to the “write something like you’re a clueless reviewer, thus abusing ‘spices’ in every possible way” concept melted thanks to that Badmash of ours, who can get me to agree to anything, especially when he brings up one of the curries I love most (though my mother makes it with potato and not fish, natch) AND the ingredient they always discovered me sneaking nibbles of in the pantry:

Sajit, I agree. Anna, how ‘bout it - 55s as angry as meen curry and as sharp as imli! :)

Mmmm, imli/puli. Know what else put me in a good mood? You might not, since a good number of you don’t read comments, which is sad when our readers go above and beyond rapid-fire ranting and write something priceless. Bongsie? Here’s lookin’ at YOU, kid:

I have perfected the art of knowing the Sepiauthor by reading the first line and no more. I’m flawless with Abhi, Manish and Anna but I need more work when it comes to Sajit, Vinod and Ennis. This was a CLASSIC Abhism:

“Since I am both an outdoor enthusiast and a lover of outdoor “gear,” I subscribe to the Adventure 16 newsletter.” (quotes mine)

This sums up his role as the MAN of the house and also demonstrates somewhat eccentric reading material - a must for any blogger. Great topics for Abhi to post about: WAR, POLITICS, WAR POLITICS, FIGHTING, MACHINES, SPACE, CAPITAL LETTERS, ROCKS and RAW MEAT.

Manish is more esoteric and loads up the sarcasm.[linky]

This is so cute — a non-desi journalist tries paan for the first time, with all the variness of a wegetarian trying a Chicken McNugget.

A rush of unfamiliar flavors flooded my tongue. After a few moments, I got nervous and spit it into my napkin. While I hoped that I wouldn’t later be punished by days in my hotel bathroom, part of me regretted the fact that I hadn’t had the full paan experience…

“What’s its appeal?” I asked. He looked at me as if I were crazy, like I was asking him why people liked chocolate. “It’s good. Everybody likes it…”

The first taste was one of overwhelming sweetness—from the rose syrup—and then I got a tang of menthol. The contents were crunchy, and the rose petal scent was strong. As I continued to chew and as the sweetness subsided, I began to taste the licorice flavor of the fennel and the warm spiciness of the cardamom…

It was strange and jarring, kind of how I remember very dark chocolate or Marmite tasting when I was a kid. But it wasn’t just the taste, it was also the mix of unusual textures—the feeling of chewing some mulch, twigs and gooey gel wrapped up in a leaf… [Link]

You can’t really use a clichéd food metaphor when you’re already reviewing food, but you just know this tai-pan has a plan B:

… it woke up my tired nose and jaded taste buds, like a walk through a crowded market in India… [Link]

The subtitle is ‘The new hot treat from India.’ This paandemic is new, didn’tcha know?

Related posts: Boing Boing discovers paan, Candy Cain

The comedy Barbershop relied on the fact that black-owned barbershops are male watering holes, informal congregations based on gossip and habit. Now New Delhi is hoping the smell of shaving cream and menthol will not only bring in the shearlings, but also help fight AIDS. Barbers have begun handing out prophylactics and pamphlets (thanks, Saurav):

Eighty-five barbers in [Delhi’s] congested southern district of Lajpat Nagar are currently involved in a programme to promote safe sex and spread the message of prevention against HIV/AIDS to their customers…

“… sometimes when I feel awkward, I point them to the posters in the shop. I have also trained others in my shop…”

… sometimes customers say they are aware of the importance of safe sex but find condoms “too expensive”. “But when I told them that they can collect condoms from various government hospitals and my shop free of cost, they readily agreed to use them. Now they even ask for them on their own…”

Eleven thousand packets of condoms have been distributed by the 85 barbers in the past six months in Lajpat Nagar alone. [Link]

Call me crazy, but I don’t like mixing straight razors with the family jewels. Eventually I saw the appeal of it. When you come in, they take a little off the top. When you leave, they give you something to put back on. I’ll never look at a barber pole the same way again.

One of my college buddies was mired in a highbrow Ph.D. program for many long years. The next time I saw him, he’d put the degree on hold and gone into business with a mutual friend, and they seemed to be doing well. ‘What happened?’ I asked. And Jim and James told me the story behind Hot or Not.

As you know, that site inspired has lots of imitators, some parodies, some not. From fertile brown minds came RateDesi. Now there’s a new contender to help you winnow your beard-sniffing dreams. It’s called Rate My Turban (via Ash Singh).

I don’t think I give anything away when I say that the top-ranked specimen perches atop the cranium of a Nihang Sikh:

How far would you go to avoid something unpleasant? Would you lie? Cheat? Publicly HUMILIATE yourself? Via the BBC:

Bollywood star Salman Khan has given an unusual excuse for not attending court this week in India - he was recovering from hair implants, his lawyers say.

Oh, it hurts to chortle THIS much. The Khan I like least had to stay home to recover from all the plugging he took. An advocate for the wispy one had more to add:

Khan’s lawyer, Dipesh Mehta, said this was the first time the actor had had hair implants.

“Salman Khan had just returned from Dubai and undergone hair-weaving treatment,” he told the BBC. “He was also suffering from flu and not feeling well.”

Feeling plugged or not, Salman is in trouble. Not showing up for his trial resulted in cancelled bail (and the Beeb article…and this post…and the evil gleam in my eye…)

Salman Khan is accused of killing two blackbucks, a small, protected species of Indian antelope, in the city of Jodhpur during a film shoot in 1998.

Mais oui, Vain-y McPlugster denies all charges. Most of you are aware— this isn’t the first time he’s behaved badly and claimed innocence. In 2002, Khan decided that homeless people looked like road and drove over them, killing one and injuring three. Besides this poaching case which he’s attempting to unplug from, he also faces a trial in Mumbai for that stunning example of deadly recklessness.

Giving Jindal the finger

As you may recall from a past post, during Iraq’s first election earlier this year, Congressman Bobby Jindal sent an email out to his fellow Republican lawmakers: paint your fingers purple in solidarity with the Iraqis. It was a great political stunt. Now it seems that some bratty little ten year old girl from Montana has stolen Jindal’s idea and gone national with the Purple Finger for Freedom campaign:

If Shelby Dangerfield were an adult in Iraq today, she would risk her life for the chance to vote.

Because she is a 10-year-old Billings girl, Shelby won’t be going to the polls. But she will be will be showing her support by wearing ink on her finger - just like those Iraqis who have voted.

“It will symbolize our support if we wear ink on our fingers,” Shelby said. “We’re not forcing them to vote, but they have a chance to do it and they should take that chance.”

Shelby said Saturday afternoon she hoped to set up a stand at Rimrock Mall today where people could sign their names and roll their fingers on a stamp pad, but her plans were not yet inked.

She’d love to wake up Monday morning and see people around the United States with blue index fingers.

“Do you have your blue ink?” she asked. “It’s food for thought.” [Link]

Well isn’t that precious? It makes me sick! How can ideas just be stolen in a law-fearing and God-fearing country like the U.S.? Does this little girl have no shame? Has anyone seen people with purple fingers over the last three days? The only fingers I see in L.A. are while I am driving, and none of them have been purple. There are some folks participating I’m sure. I wonder what it would take to get a “Sepia finger” campaign going. I’d need a good cause of course.

Much of humanity has been working for the past year to rebuild the shattered lives and infrastructure laid waste by last December’s devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean. For the first time however, we are getting a glimpse at the damage suffered by the deep-sea ecosystem at one site near the epicenter of the 9.3 earthquake. Needless to say, the jellyfish and cephalopods were not happy either.

An example of deep-sea life: female anglerfish

A dead zone, devoid of all marine life, has been discovered near the epicentre of last year’s tsunami earthquake, 2.5 miles beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean.

The first scientific expedition to the epicentre found little or no effect on deep sea fauna except at one site off Sumatra where, five months after the disaster, no evidence was found of large animals.

British scientists taking part in the Census of Marine Life, a worldwide marine survey, made an 11-hour dive with a robot submarine. [Link]

The Census of Marine Life is a group of scientists engaged in an important ten year study:

Through 2010, scientists worldwide will work to quantify what is known, unknown, and what may never be known about the world’s oceans-which comprise more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and more than 90 percent of its biosphere. Their answers will help identify threatened species and important breeding areas, helping authorities develop effective strategies for the sustainable management of marine resources. New pharmaceuticals and industrial compounds are also among the potential uses of the estimated thousands of undescribed species that will be found. And as the secrets of the planet’s last unexplored frontier are revealed, our understanding of elemental processes such as climate, evolution, extinction, and migration will expand.

Disco DJ Ennis in da virtual hiz-ouse!

Remember “flesh colored” bandaids - the ones that didn’t look anything like your flesh, and which stood out like a pink gash on your arm? This same problem recurs in the virtual world. Cyberspace is oddly eurocentric given the vast number of cyber-coolies who work to maintain and extend it. Despite the years that have elapsed since the end of the flesh-colored crayon, very little of the virtual world is easily extensible to look like me.

One noteworthy exception is a company called Weeworld that specializes in the creation of avatars for use with Skype or other services. Their web application lets you specify settings for 23 variables, each of which can take on multiple values, to create an image of yourself for only 1.5 Euros. Not only can you specify whatever skin, hair and eye color you want, but you can also give your icon facial hair and even a fairly realistic looking turban! It is a profound demonstration of the deep penetration of desis into British cultural life when a British company, producing for a largely European audience, includes a turban as a standard option. [Hat tip to Mr Sikhnet]

Most of H.R. 4437, the “Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005” discussed in Abhi’s post, looks like the trainwreck that he deems it. Still, I think that the part that amends Section 274A of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1324a) to increase penalties on employers for hiring undocumented workers is a step in the right direction. The United States needs a more honest immigration policy, one that includes neither support for law-breaking nor animus toward immigrants, and as long as employers win on the cost benefit analysis — F x P < S, where F= cost of fines, P= probability of getting caught, and S= saved money from using undocumented labor — we never will have such reforms. Supporting illegal immigration is at best a short term help to such aliens, as they deal with the longterm problems of having to remain invisible and lack access to the safety net for the elderly, i.e. Social Security and Medicare. Whose sympathy for the undocumented cab driver extends far enough to pay for his prescriptions when he’s too old to drive anymore?

Since I am both an outdoor enthusiast and a lover of outdoor “gear,” I subscribe to the Adventure 16 newsletter. Adventure 16 is a Southern California outdoor equipment retailer. A couple times a month the local store holds an informal seminar or slideshow about some kick-ass expedition or nature trip that has taken place or soon will. In theory, you’ll be so amped after the presentation that you will buy lots of gear from the store, hoping someday to emulate the feat that you have just heard about. My most recent newsletter featured a blurb about an upcoming event that will relate details about an adventure that I had surprisingly never heard of:

In the 1960’s, the CIA and the Indian Government attempted to deploy a plutonium-powered spy device on Nanda Devi and Nanda Kot in the Indian Himalayas. While Nanda Kot’s device was successfully deployed, Nada Devi rejected all attempts to place the device on her summit and the plutonium was lost and never recovered. In August 2005, Pete Takeda and his crew retraced the spy route on Nanda Kot, visiting the camps used to stage the 1936 first ascent and the spy missions of the 1960’s. Don’t miss this amazing journey! FREE!

San Diego Store: Mon., Jan. 9
West Los Angeles Store: Tues., Jan. 10

This sounds like the beginning to a Tom Clancy novel. I am intrigued. Must-learn-more. As you may have expected, there is in fact an entire book written on this subject: Spy On The Roof Of The World : Espionage and Survival in the Himalayas.

In this cross between a travel adventure story and an espionage novel, Sydney Wignall tells how he became an ad hoc spy for a renegade faction of Indian intelligence operatives in 1955. Wignall had set out to climb the highest mountain in Tibet, but was recruited to investigate Chinese military activity in the region. After being caught, he spent months in a rat-infested, sub-freezing cell as he underwent interrogation. When international pressure forced his release, his captors “released” him and two companions in a nearly impenetrable wintertime wilderness and said “Go home.” Yet Wignall survived—and managed to smuggle out vital information. It is an exhilarating story that only now can be told. [Link]

• Renegade faction of Indian intelligence
• Months in a rat-infested cell
• Interrogation
• Impenetrable wintertime

If that list isn’t enough to get me to open my wallet and drop some money on new gear at Adventure 16, then frankly I’m not much of a man.

Here at the Mutiny, we’re reduced to excerpting former guest bloggers on slow news days Because, y’know, they’re good. Spake Saheli on Snarkmarket about those who dislike Indian food:

It just reminds me too much of schoolchildren pointing and going, “eww, smelly Indian food.” It’s one thing if you don’t like the taste of cumin—you aren’t going to like Indian food. It’s another thing if you insist that it’s foul and anyone who likes it has issues. It’s not the idea that “Wow I really didn’t like this,” that I object to. It’s the implication that, therefore, neither will you, dear reader…

I hated fried bitter melon when I was a child, for instance, and now it’s one of my favorite foods. But I’d be insane to just dump a bowlful on your plate, you’d probably gag. I ate one at time, very slowly, over the course of many years until I liked it. And it’s a bad idea to force things on small children, b/c their sense of smell isn’t that well developed and is much more geared towards rejecting things. (Makes sense—keeps them from eating random stuff they don’t yet have the knowledge to reject.) [Link]

One of the bloggers adds that he dislikes Indo-Caribbean tamarind balls:

Tamarind balls were a particular sticking point. Our rejection of our parents’ delicacies was always taken as a full-on betrayal of our culturesMy Guyanese parents, aunts, and uncles all insisted they were an unparalleled taste treat; elder siblings and cousins sympathized with my disappointment. Our rejection of our parents’ delicacies was always taken as a full-on betrayal of our cultures, and met with sad diatribes about how Americanized we’d become.

Whenever we disdained one of her many Guyanese or British comfort foods, my mom would launch into wonderful stories about her childhood, how she loved tamarind balls, how she used to cry when her mother told her she couldn’t have any more of the sticky, spicy, sweet, sour snacks. And here we were, fêted with tamarind balls to our hearts’ content, and we refuse?! What could be wrong with us?… [Link]

Asok corrects the boss

In the latest Dilbert, Asok the intern puts the pointy-haired boss in his place.

I’ve often heard from uncle types that desis don’t advance up the U.S. corporate ladder because they’re bad at office politics. But business in the motherland is highly political. I think it’s partly that they’re unfamiliar with American office politics, and partly that many of the straight-arrow types emigrated precisely to get away from it.

Hong Kong: make your teeth as white as black people’s.

This is apparently widely sold as Black Man Toothpaste in Cantonese:

Darlie toothpaste is a popular brand in much of Asia… it used to be called Darkie, complete with a stereotyped logo of a minstrel man. Apparently its founder had come to the US in the 1920s and seen Al Jolson in his blackface show, and had been impressed with how white Jolson’s teeth looked…

… its racist name and logo were still intact in 1985 when Colgate bought the brand… only the English was changed. The Cantonese name (“Haak Yahn Nga Gou”) still stayed the same, and the Chinese-language ads reassured users that, despite a cosmetic change to placate those inscrutable Westerners, “Black Man Toothpaste is still Black Man Toothpaste.” [Link, via Big White Guy]

Anti-development protest in China last week: at least 20 people gunned down by authorities, total news blackout.

403 Forbidden: You don’t have permission to speak freely in this country

… the police violently suppressed a demonstration against the construction of a power plant in China… the stories told by villagers… insisted that 20 or more people had been killed by automatic weapons fire and that at least 40 were still missing…

In the wake of the biggest use of armed force against civilians since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, Chinese officials have used a variety of techniques - from barring reports in most newspapers outside the immediate region to banning place names and other keywords associated with the event from major Internet search engines, like Google - to prevent news of the deaths from spreading… an overwhelming majority of the Chinese public still knows nothing of the event…

… Fang Sanwen, the news director of Netease.com, one of China’s three major Internet portals and news providers [said], “I can’t speak. I hope you can understand.” Li Shanyou, editor in chief of Sohu.com, another of the leading portals, said: “… It’s not very convenient to comment on this…” “I started searching with Baidu, and Baidu went out of service at once. I could open their site, but couldn’t do any searches.”

“I don’t dare to talk,” another blogger wrote. “There are sensitive words everywhere…” [Link]

Anti-development protest in India a few years ago: nobody killed, lots of celebrity distractivism all over TV.

A group of activists led by best-selling Indian author Arundhati Roy is on its way back to Delhi at the end of a six-day rally to protest against a controversial dam project [Narmada Dam]… The group [was] made up of some 500 activists, artists and celebrities… [Link]

Last Tuesday Wisconsin Congressman James Sensenbrenner introduced legislation on the House floor that will greatly impact the South Asian American community as well as many other immigrant populations. The legislation is up for vote on Dec. 15th. The San Jose Mercury News reports on the bill:

Sensenbrenner’s measure combines the border security bill by homeland security chairman Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. with several other enforcement provisions. The key non-border enforcement measure is patterned after a bill by Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., to require employers to verify the Social Security numbers of their employees. Such a program is now voluntary.

Sensenbrenner’s bill would give employers six years to use a federal data base to verify that all their employees are legally entitled to work here. Calvert’s bill would have applied only to new hires and phased in compliance.

Sensenbrenner’s bill also increases the penalties for employers found to hire illegal immigrants, with the minimum fine going from $250 per illegal worker to $5,000. Small business would have lower fines.

“If we do just this,” Calvert said Tuesday, “we’ll pick up about 95 percent of those who are using false documents” to get their jobs.

In reality though this bill will have the same effect as chasing a fly around the house with a baseball bat. The bill, if enacted into law, would not only punish illegal immigrants, but it would also punish almost everyone that they come into contact with (possibly even social service workers). This is pure politics. House Republicans need some issue to rally behind that appeals to their conservative base and will serve to take people’s minds off the war in Iraq. By allowing the anti-immigration wing of the Republican party to take center stage they have found their issue. For the final touch they pretend that this is also about helping to keep terrorists out of the country. As a bonus, Republican congressman uneasily eyeing elections next year, can put some space between themselves and President Bush who is partially on the other side of the fence (pun intended) from his own party on this issue, as he supports a guest worker program. Earlier today SAALT put out an alert asking the South Asian American community to immediately write their representative and senators and urge them to vote this down:

If passed, the bill threatens to have a harmful impact on non-citizens, legal residents, and citizens. If enacted, this bill will be the harshest immigration policy in 80 years. The bill was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee late last week. It is expected to be voted on by the entire House as early as Thursday of this week. The day to call your representative in the House is WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14th.

Maybe get a blister on your little finger,
Maybe get a blister on your thumb
That ain’t workin’, that’s the way to do it

For some time I’ve been keeping an eye on gold farming, the business of paying kids to build up loot in online games and then selling it for real money to Western marks. Although some entrepreneurs use automated scripts, most use humans: 100,000 kids in China, South Korea and Indonesia supposedly work in the industry. In a recent crossover into real life, someone in Shanghai murdered his buddy for selling a virtual sword he wasn’t supposed to sell.

Most of the players here actually make less than a quarter an hour, but they often get room, board and free computer game play in these “virtual sweatshops…” “They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers.” [Link]

The economist Edward Castranova has calculated that if you took the real dollars spent within EverQuest as an index, its game world… would be the 77th richest nation on the planet, while annual player earnings [per capita] surpass those of citizens of Bulgaria, India or China. [Link]

Most stories I’ve read treat gold farming as a curiosity, which is a bit of a paradox. One, journalists think of valuable property in games as an oxymoron, even though they earn their own living from intellectual property. Two, many journalists are non-technical, even though their work is often published online:

The idea that sums of money are being paid for what appears to be an unproductive economic activity will cheese off traditionalists who believe that unless a job is located in an industrial factory, it serves no good purpose. [Link]

Dr. Ramanand Sagar, the man who captivated India with his televised version of the epic Ramayana, passed away yesterday at the age of 87.

First telecast in 1987 on India’s state-run television, the 78-episode serial, based on the life of Lord Rama, one the most revered deities in Hinduism, often brought the country to a halt.

Weddings were delayed, trains came to a halt and social events were re-scheduled so that people could watch the series, telecast every Sunday.

The high-pitched serial, with its garish production values, also had its critics who suggested Sagar’s work helped fan Hindu nationalism in the country.[BBC]

I don’t know about that last sentence— I remember the serial and I didn’t see saffron, but perhaps I was too young to notice such things. “High-pitched” or not, I will always be grateful for this unintentionally campy classic; it gave a frustrated father and sullen teenager a reason to talk, interact, bond. Asking my father why Sita was suffering and listening, spell-bound as he expounded on epics, Hinduism, faith and culture is something I’ll never forget.

Though born near Lahore to “one of the most aristocratic and wealthiest families”, Sagar didn’t remain privileged:

Sagar was later thrown out of his house after he refused to accept the dowry system and had to struggle for a living. The young Ramanad worked as a peon, truck cleaner, soap vendor, goldsmith apprentice during thr day and studied for his degree at night.[Rediff]

At age 30, after knowing success as a journalist, author, filmmaker, actor, screenwriter and playwright, Sagar, like so many others, lost everything:

In 1947, Sagar had to flee to India with his family.

Besides the notable exception of our Lost boy Naveen, the following nominations are only mildly desi (i.e. it’s the show or movie which got recognized, BUT the aformentioned program or flick has a brown cast member). You know, it’s almost like they enhanced this exotic soup of international Golden Globe nods with…I don’t know…curry powder? Fenugreek? Asafoetida? ;) Perhaps they wanted to emulate the Village Voice and concoct an electric curry of sweeping overdubbed strings.

The just barely sepia aspects of all this aside, any day I get to post a picture of le hottie to the left—Weeds’ Maulik Pancholy—is a veddy good day, indeed.

Via Gothamist and AnkG:

Best TV Comedy: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Desperate Houswives, Entourage, Everybody Hates Chris, My Name is Earl, Weeds

Best TV Drama: Commander in Chief, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, Prison Break, Rome

Supporting Actor, Miniseries or Movie: Naveen Andrews, Lost; Paul Newman, Empire Falls; Jeremy Piven, Entourage; Randy Quaid, Elvis; Donald Sutherland, Commander in Chief.

Best Film, Drama: Brokeback Montain, The Constant Gardener, Good Night and Good Luck, History of Violence, Match Point

Best Director: Woody Allen (Match Point), George Clooney (Good Night and Good Luck), Peter Jackson (King Kong), Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain), Fernando Mereilles (The Constant Gardener), Steven Spielberg (Munich)

Related mutinousnesssss: eka, dva, tri, chatur

As Abhi posted, several Indian members of Parliament were caught taking bribes to ask questions on the Parliament floor. Because some of the journalists involved are also bloggers, one of the questions asked included the name of our blog.

Abhi has the summary of events. What interests me are the cultural implications:

• Sepia Mutiny is now on the floor record of the Indian Parliament (thanks, Aaj Tak and Cobra Post!) Ahhh, to be a footnote in Indian political history.
• Sepia Mutiny is now, apparently, British
• You can now legitimately mention Sepia Mutiny in your poli sci classes
• Ennis says:
  
  

  Often statements are read into the record for constituents and donors, and these are usually not checked over. Causes embarassment when the “freedom fighters” mentioned are later reclassified by the US govt as terrorist groups, but nobody really cares.

  But has there ever been a U.S. political scandal where prima facia nonsensical questions were purchased for the Congressional record?

The sting was called ‘Operation Duryodhana,’ which has some interesting connotations from the Mahabharata. This one is a pun on Cobra Post and ‘sting operation’:

[Duryodhana’s] chariot bore a flag depicting a hooded cobra… [Link]

The Indian blogosphere and the Indian political system were rocked today. The tipsters have started to flood our tipline with the hilarious news. Members of India’s Parliament were bribed by a fictitious organization created by a group of Indian bloggers and journalists to introduce statements on the record, without having any idea what they were saying. This was a sting operation to expose the corruption in Indian government. One of those written statements included a reference to Sepia Mutiny. First the background:

If used rightly, tiny, lens bearing aperatures, can empower a citizenry by exposing democracy’s toxic acreage. Operation Duryodhana, a COBRAPOST-AAJ TAK investigation lasting nearly eight months succeeded in capturing the acts of 10 Lok Sabha and one Rajya Sabha members as they accepted money from representatives of a fictitious body called the North Indian Small Manufacturers’ Assosciation (NISMA) for asking questions in the Indian Parliament. In all more than 60 questions were submitted by 11 MPs of which 25 questions (at last count) were tabled in the Parliament…

The MPs submitted questions on NISMA’s behalf and some of them were selected—and their answers given—in the Parliament’s rigorous balloting system that reduces chances of questions being taken up to something akin to a raffle. Some of the questions were rewritten by the middlemen taking us to the MPs concerned before being put in Parliament, some came nearly verbatim and only certain sections of some were picked up by the Parliament staff. The COBRAPOST team also has in its possession many, original signed forms of MPs, blank as well as filled up, which weren’t submitted but set aside as evidence.

From the start it was my assessment that in order for a reportorial team to remain undercover for a long duration it would be prudent to have a woman reporter as the primary asset on the field. Their biggest advantage in undercover situations is that even in an extreme atmosphere of suspicion they have greater chances to evade a search for hidden camera equipment then men and for all the right reasons. Besides Suhasini Raj, the reporter, who was inserted in the field with an alias of “Namita Gokhale”, had a past selling insurance and was a fast talker. Never at a loss for words, she ended up doing an extraordinary job on the field, surviving several anxious moments when many middlemen and even MPs got their antennae up. The fictitious front under whose umbrella the COBRAPOST team operated was NISMA, ostensibly an organization out of Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh, that lobbied and worked for the interests and welfare of Small Scale Industries (SSIs). That was, in a nutshell, our story. Even though on several occasions I was tempted to enter the field much earlier than I actually did, I held back realizing that it wouldn’t be prudent for there was a chance of somebody recognizing me. When I did eventually take the field with an alias of “Navratan Malhotra”, executive director of the ‘fictitious’ NISMA, I was armed with a ludicrous wig and even more ludicrous glasses. [Link]

How was Sepia Mutiny involved? One of the MPs was paid to submit the following to Parliament, and apparently did so without a clue in the world as to what he was saying:

“Is it true that while NRI firms such as India Uncut of USA, Sepia Mutiny of Britain and AnarCap Lib of Netherlands have been allowed to invest in Indian SSIs, the reputed German investment firm Desipundit has been denied permission? If so, the reasons thereof? Is the Union Government of India planning to make automatic the long procedure of permission for SSIs to import new technologies such as Trackbacks, Pingbacks, Blogrolls, Splogs and Hitcounters?”

Even though the award is probably one of the ones announced at an event held prior to the televised Grammy Awards, I am still excited to see both Anoushka Shankar’s Rise and Asha Bhosle’s You’ve Stolen My Heart- Songs From R D Burman’s Bollywood up for one of the prestigious awards. It is just too bad they are up for the same one. Announced this past Thursday, it turns out both Bhosle, sister of the illustrious Lata Mangeshkar, and Shankar, whose half-sister Norah Jones is also up for a Grammy, have each been nominated in the category of “best contemporary world music album.” While the Grammy category groups these albums together, I don’t think the albums could be more different.

From what I have heard of these two records, both are great, just in very different ways. Shankar’s Rise is an interesting effort: traditional Indian classical meets contemporary that is sometimes touched by electronic via the Midival Punditz’s Gaurav Raina. Bhosle’s You’ve Stolen My Heart , which was done with the Kronos Quartet, is pure filmy, but a nice musical reworking of classic Bollywood.

Also nominated in the same category are Amadou & Mariam for Dimanche A Bamako, Gilberto Gil for Eletracústico, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo & The Strings Of The English Chamber Orchestra for No Boundaries. The Grammy’s air on CBS on Wednesday February 8. Let’s hope for a mutinous outcome, after all, there is a two out of five chance.

More mutiny on Asha/Kronos here and here. Also, here is a link to a piece the Village Voice did last week on You’ve Stolen My Heart, and some other Bollywood music. I don’t really like the article because I can’t take it when critics who cover South Asian music always make food metaphors.

The music is an electric curry of sweeping overdubbed strings playing a blend of devotional music and action film motifs.

When an Indian television station insists on titling a finance program “Oriental and Occidental,” it is time for me to expend no more energy on protesting such terms’ use as racial descriptives.

I had thought that having American Heritage Dictionary recognize “oriental” as problematic was a step forward, but I suppose I can count on the thick-brown-skinned folks at CNBC-TV18 to maintain the status quo. Nonetheless, I will complain that the subject of the show doesn’t even seem relevant to the name; what does foreign investment in India have to do with that old binary of “Oriental” versus “Occidental”? Particularly when some of the global market gurus include non-Occidentals like Ayaz Ebrahim, the Asia-Pacific CEO for Asia-based HSBC. The explorers of the exotic East, at least when it comes to the international flow of capital, no longer are solely Caucasians.

The prompt for an economics writing competition when I was an undergraduate was something like, “Free trade contributes to peace.” I don’t know if that is true, but I would think that genuinely free trade — in contrast to the protectionist economies of 18th and 19th century imperialism, against which Adam Smith wrote — might erase some of the old ways of Orientalist thinking.

As I flip through channels, words like violence break the silence, they come crashing in, in to my little world via an Australian reporter being phone-interviewed on FOX news:

What we’ve seen here is that these locals are attacking anyone with a different color skin.

Shudder

Since FOX news helpfully changed the subject right after that incendiary quote, I am left to frantically type “Australia” and “race” in my Google toolbar. I’m dismayed by what I find; tensions between “local” Australians and those who are of Lebanese descent have exploded. Apparently a few of the Lebanese-Australians attacked innocent lifeguards on the beach and “locals” retaliated, much to the delight of Aussie Neo-Nazi retards.

Hordes of vigilantes who had marinated in sun and alcohol sought vengeance against the “Lebs” for this and other, more disturbing offences. No good can come of this revenge race. I cringe at the way “Middle Eastern appearance” is being tossed around, because I am just waiting for some brown person to get caught up in this tragic mix, since we look more “Middle Eastern” than, well, Middle Eastern people do.

Another thought strikes me— sure enough, you tipsters are on it. Mutineer Ananthan points me towards the following, massively disturbing words in the Sydney Morning Herald:

A BARE-CHESTED youth in Quiksilver boardshorts tore the headscarf off the girl’s head as she slithered down the Cronulla dune seeking safety on the beach from a thousand-strong baying mob.

Up on the road, Marcus “Carcass” Butcher, 28, a builder from Penrith, wearing workboots, war-camouflage shorts and black singlet bearing the words “Mahommid was a camel f—-ing faggot” raised both arms to the sky. “F—- off, Leb,” he cried victoriously.

Indeed, victory is yours, you idiot.

DESI PAK

The technique used to cram entire extended families into a single Ambassador or Bajaj. Related expression in Hindi: ‘ghusna,’ to squeeze in quickly, quietly and off the books before the train leaves, your shady money-making scheme is shut down or the government babu cuts off the subsidies. Not to be confused with ‘Pak Desi.’

I don’t suppose they’re referring to latex. No s-hecks please, we’re desi.

HARMLESS

Harmless, fatalist and philosophical. A non-conquering, non-converting subcontinent with a Hindu rate of growth and long, whinging, political addas. Then everyone goes home and returns the current party to power.

ADSORBENT

Attracts liquids — either Old Monk or Señor Walker.

DO NOT EAT

Please do not eat the desis.

(UNLESS WE BEG FOR IT)

It’s all good then.

Another racist election, another heartbreakingly close loss: Jay Aiyer lost to Sue Lovell for Houston city council by the whopping margin of… 1.6%.

Lesson? Allegedly calling your desi opponent a terrorist probably works. With these kinds of margins (18 votes against Tom Abraham, 1.6% here), it can’t hurt.

In the closest and most heavily voted contest, Sue Lovell beat opponent Jay Aiyer by one percentSue Lovell beat opponent Jay Aiyer by one percent…

Calling your desi opponent a terrorist works for the At-Large Position 2 on City Council. [Link]

In the race for Houston City Council at-large Position 2, Jay Aiyer has raised more money than Sue Lovell. Since the Nov. 8 general election, when the two emerged from a field of five to make the runoff, Aiyer has raised $89,000 and Lovell $56,000…

But Lovell has had outside help. The Service Employees International Union contributed $10,000 to Lovell’s campaign and sent three mailings on her behalf during the campaign leading to the Nov. 8 election. It sent two more during the runoff campaign. Aiyer said the mailings by SEIU violate a city ordinance prohibiting “coordinated campaign expenditures” — direct work on behalf of a candidate by an organization whose expenditures aren’t listed on the candidate’s campaign finance reports. [Link]

One long-time Aiyer supporter wrote:

It is difficult for me to believe that a Council seat can be bought by one of the largest labor unions in the country. Shame on you voters of Houston. Shame on you Democratic Party of Houston. I expected more of you. It is so transparent that Sue did not spend any money on direct mail and she herself admitted that SEIU was going to do an Independent Expenditure. [Link]

Related posts: Teach racists a lesson for five bucks (updated), Today is Jay Day, It’s over

Hench-desi #1

Kiran Shah, who’s 4’1” tall, plays Ginarrbrik the White Witch’s dwarf henchman in The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardobe. And it’s a pretty big role. He gets to gasp theatrically when he’s eventually nailed with an arrow. The moment drew big laughs.

It’s interesting seeing a henchman with an obviously desi accent, though not new. Shah also played scale double for all four hobbits in Lord of the Rings.

[Born] 28 September 1956 [in] Nairobi, Kenya… Because of his size, versatility, and willingness, Shah is much in high demand as a perspective stunt-double for long-shots in action scenes. Auditioned for the part of R2-D2 in Star Wars (1977), narrowly losing out to Kenny Baker. Worked as a tailor’s apprentice for six months before seriously starting his acting/stunt career. [Link]

You know how you can tell in the first 10 minutes that a movie is going to deeply suck, and all you can do is sigh and settle in? That’s Narnia, and its 76% favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a joke. I can only assume reviewers are paying deference to the excellent novels and don’t want to get caught on the wrong side of another mega-franchise. The script has all the anachronistic smarminess of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Its fundamental problem is you’re stuck watching bad child actors for nearly three hours. The movie is slow, the editing slack, the lines cheesy.

And it’s fundamentally The Passion of the Simba. The movie, paid for in part by a wealthy Christian religious activist, is awash in Biblical allegory. Its climax is a lame, in-your-face re-enactment of Jesus’ resurrection that had my Jewish theater mates groaning. The New York audience laughed openly at all the unintentional camp. There’s also some jarringly bad CGI (mismatched lighting against a green screen, an obvious transition from glowing graphical fur to fakey, inert stuffed animal). After the movie, I overheard much griping outside the theater, in the bathroom line and on the subway.

Colbert’s best ‘Indian’ friend

Steven Colbert jokes about Native American reparations:

Now, I don’t talk about this much, but I’m one-thirteenth Chickasaw. In fact, some of my best friends are Indians. So I understand this issue in a way you Anglos don’t.

Watch the clip, it’s at 0:40.

Related posts: Fatty fatwa, O Henry

You just know that anyone caught embezzling money in any way related to 9/11 is going to be nailed. Rediff.com reports on one such individual:

An Indian-American has been arrested for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars from a fund meant to help identify victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre.

Prosecutors alleged that about $5.5 million had been transferred to bank accounts in India at the instance of Natarajan R Venkataram, a former administrator in the New York city medical examiner’s office…

The fund had been set up to buy computer hardware and software to help in the identification of victims.

Apparently he was in this together with his co-worker/girlfriend Rosa Abreau. Let’s see which one will be the first to flip and turn state’s evidence against the other. If you threw in a murder this would make a good Law & Order episode.

Following Sept. 11, the duo steered an $11.4 million contract to Comprehensive Computer Resources, controlled by a close associate of Venkataram, who’s been cooperating with investigators in an effort to lessen his punishment.

While Comprehensive Computer Resources did work for the medical examiner, city officials determined it could have been done for a fraction of the cost, and have vowed to recover the millions lost.

Money was transferred out of Comprehensive Computer Resources accounts by Venkataram with blank checks signed by a Venkataram associate at the company. Some $400,000 was deposited in the account of a shell company controlled by [Rosa] Abreu’s stepmother and another $86,000 to a company controlled by Venkataram’s roommate, authorities say. [Link]

Today you take a stand against ignorant, pathetic, politics-as-usual. We are not dot-headed terrorists and we do not fly planes in to buildings. When people cravenly suggest such outrageous things, we call them out on their bullshit as they scurry behind technicalities which don’t matter to anyone with a functioning brain.

Don’t live in Houston? No problem. You and I are going to engage in that most important aspect of political campaigning— Getting out the VOTE. I have a few dozen relatives in Houston, so do you. Today’s the day you make a phone call and tell them to get to the polls to vote for Jay. What are you waiting for?

Map of the world with each country scaled by population size

Above is a map of world populations: “the larger the country, the bigger its population. Each grid square represents a million people.” [Link]

When you eyeball the map, a few things leap out at you in a way that they don’t when presented with a table of numbers:

• India has 1 billion people, or roughly 1/6th of the world’s population
• Pakistan and Bangladesh together have slightly more people that the US. If there was still a “United Pakistan” it would displace the US as the world’s third largest country.
• There are more people living on the subcontinent than there are on most other continents. More South Asians than Europeans, Africans, North Americans or South Americans. As a matter of fact, there are more Indians than people in these other continents.

The same website also presents similar maps of past and future population levels of the world from 100,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, 350 years ago (1650), 100 years ago (1900), and even a projection of the world’s population 150 years from now in 2150. [via BoingBoing]

(via Econlog) Those of the any Asian persuasion in the last 10-15 years have probably heard at least one campus activist screaming about the Model Minority Myth. Now, simple yokel that I am, I would have have thought it a good thing to be a model for just about anything (although I suppose I’m still waiting for swashbuckling, studmeister South Indian action hero…).

But, there’s a certain corpus of thought in Leftist politics that strongly believes otherwise. They assert that the Model Minority Myth is perpetrated by The Man for a variety of motives such as the ones summarized at ModelMinority.com -

…Americans reluctant to address the realities of continuing racism and white privilege have consistently portrayed Asian Americans as a “model minority” who have uniformly succeeded by merit.

While superficially complimentary to Asian Americans, the real purpose and effect of this portrayal is to celebrate the status quo in race relations. First, by over-emphasizing Asian American success, it de-emphasizes the problems Asian Americans continue to face from racial discrimination in all areas of public and private life. Second, by misrepresenting Asian American success as proof that America provides equal opportunities for those who conform and work hard, it excuses American society from careful scrutiny on issues of race in general, and on the persistence of racism against Asian Americans in particular.

A recent, interesting study conducted by Northwestern U decided to put some of these claims to the test.

Could India become a petro-rupee state? The Indian oil minister said last week that the country has almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia, just when conventional wisdom says it’s running out. Energy independence would be excellent; relying on oil without building a real economy, disastrous.

Petrominister

[Mani] Shankar Aiyar, minister of petroleum for India… believes that India could become a petrodollar state in the 21st century… The optimism is grounded in massive oil deposits, close to 30 billion tons, in Central India. That’s twice the size of the deposits in Iraq (13 billion tons, according to the Institute of Petroleum) and just shy of Saudi deposits. With this, India, which imports 70 percent of its oil, could become an exporter… [Link]

India may exhaust its existing oil fields soon, and as its economy grows, so does its thirst:

India has oil reserves to last only till 2016, if no new discovery is made, the Petroleum Minister, Mr Mani Shankar Aiyar, said today. [Link]

ONGC’s oil output has stalled at about 520,000 barrels a day in the past couple of years and is expected to decline as older fields near the end of their productive lifespan. Mr Aiyar voiced concerns about a fall in domestic output at a time when India’s rapidly expanding economy is fuelling huge demand for energy. [Link]

Central India has oil deposits twice the size of those in Iraq and just shy of Saudi deposits. But they’re not easy to extract

India ranks sixth in the world in terms of energy demand… While India has significant reserves of coal, it is relatively poor in oil and gas resources… The majority of India’s oil reserves are located in fields offshore Bombay and onshore in Assam. Due to stagnating domestic crude production, India imports approximately 70% of its oil, much of it from the Middle East… The World Energy Outlook… projects that India’s dependence on oil imports will grow to 91.6% by the year 2020. [Link]

Nearly half [India’s] electricity, according to various estimates, gets stolen by individuals placing illegal feed wires onto power lines… [Link]

Verity, at the conservative blog Albion’s Seedlings, says she wants to settle in India and buy property there. However, she’s been told that she can do neither.

My understanding is that with the approval of the Reserve Bank, she can buy property for residential purposes, and Wikipedia claims, “Citizenship of India by naturalisation can be acquired by a foreigner who is ordinarily resident in India for twelve years (continuously for the twelve months preceding the date of application and for eleven years in the aggregate in the fourteen years preceding the twelve months).”

Anyone know more about this than just what a Google search turns up?

How many of you feel inhibited in using a language other than English when you are out in public? I know that I think twice about speaking in Punjabi on my cell when there are others around. Here are two examples of recent language xenophobia incidents. The first involves Zach Rubio, a 16 year old student in Kansas City who was suspended for speaking Spanish in the halls:

Zach Rubio’s high school had no such signs

“It was, like, totally not in the classroom,” the high school junior said, recalling the infraction. “We were in the, like, hall or whatever, on restroom break. This kid I know, he’s like, ‘Me prestas un dolar?’ [‘Will you lend me a dollar?’] Well, he asked in Spanish; it just seemed natural to answer that way. So I’m like, ‘No problema.’ “

A teacher who overheard the two boys sent Zach to the office, where Principal Jennifer Watts ordered him to call his father and leave the school… in a written “discipline referral” explaining her decision to suspend Zach for 1 1/2 days, she noted: “This is not the first time we have [asked] Zach and others to not speak Spanish at school.” [Link]

Note that this high school has no policy against speaking Spanish outside of class, and even if it did, it would be difficult to understand how such a policy could be legal.

The second incident involves an editorial assistant at the Chicago Tribune named (verdad) Ahmad. A. Ahmad:

The Amtrak train was four hours outside New York City when we heard the conductor’s voice on the loudspeaker…We were all stuck, somewhere in the middle of New York state, and we would have to wait for a bus to take us to the nearest big city… I decided to call my mother in Chicago to tell her what happened. We spoke in our native tongue, Arabic.

… I heard sirens approaching, and the bus suddenly came to a stop on the side of the highway. Police cars came—so many I couldn’t even begin to count them… The man told police he understood Arabic and had overheard my conversation. He thought I was talking to some terrorist cell when I was chatting with my mother… The authorities questioned me for nearly three hours at an Albany police station. They asked me where I was from, whether I was a United States citizen, who I knew in New York City, who I worked for, and why I was traveling alone. [Link]

The grabbing hands, grab all they can, everything counts in large amounts. Tonight, a certain group plays Washington, DC. I won’t be there, but I have fond memories of seeing them live; they were my first concert as well as my last. I used to carefully write “Music is the only thing that matters.” on all my mix CDs, I’m famous for kicking someone out of my bed (get your minds out of the gutter— I wasn’t in it) because they disrespected the easiest bossanova song to appreciate of all time. Like the scent of Madelines, music conjures past lives powerfully.

Today, if you are in search of a theme, find one in aural pleasure: concerts, music, memories of the first song you ever danced to with a boy (“Bizzare Love Triangle”: in 1989). As always, write freely and ignore such suggestions if you desire; the most important thing is that you leave your sweetest perfection (or a link to it) in the comments below.

Farrokh Chothia and Atul Kasbekar are two well-known Indian commercial photographers. A lot of their fashion photography is vacuously pretty, but they’ve posted a handful of intriguing photos in their online portfolios:

I figured that it is was well past time that I showed some love to the South Asian community down in Houston. Every Thursday from 3:30-5:30p.m., Houston’s KPFT 90.1 FM is taken over by GenerAsian Radio featuring DJs Yogi and Alex. You can either catch it live or listen to past shows that they have uploaded to the web:

GenerAsian Radio is a unique radio program featuring an eclectic mix of Asian Underground, Hindi, Bhangra, Arabic, house, and hip-hop. Started back in 2002, the show has been widely popular among the South Asian youths and also among Middle Eastern, Hispanic, European, American music lovers. The show features interviews with musicians and artists from all over the world, live mixes in the studio, and cultural community events. GenerAsian Radio airs live on the web as Real Audio or MP3 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM CST on Thursdays.

What I like to do sometimes is to listen to the GenerAsian radio clips while either writing a post for SM or reading a post written by one of my co-bloggers. Sepia Mutiny needs theme music to be properly enjoyed. I have long subscribed to the idea that life would be more worth living if we all had our own personal soundtracks. Unfortunately society has not yet reached my prescient conclusion, so in the meantime I rely on websites like GenerAsian radio’s to mix something up.

President Musharraf yesterday proposed a two pronged approach to producing a “Muslim renaissance.”

Step 1, Ban all hate and terror organizations:

Senseless acts of terrorism committed by a handful of misguided individuals while claiming to act in the name of Islam have maligned our noble faith of peace, tolerance and compassion … We must condemn and reject all forces of terrorism and extremism, banning organisations which preach hate and violence. We must promote the Islamic values of tolerance and moderation,”… [Link]

Step 2, Fund lots of science:

The president said most Islamic societies remained far removed from the expanding frontiers of knowledge, education, science and technology. Any dreams of progress on these fronts would remain unfulfilled if not fully backed by collective will and adequate financial resources, he said. [Link]

A desi Lt. Colonel was detained for 4 hours because air marshals didn’t “like the way he looked” When I was a little boy, I believed in an America where all men were equal before the law, and due process was paramount. However, when I grew up, I put away childish things and saw that this was not true. Therefore, I put on my best Stepin Fetchit imitation when flying, grinning broadly, shucking and jiving. I call somebody at each leg of my journey, so that there is a paper trail just in case somebody decides that I look “wrong” and I get stopped for flying while brown. [Why not drive? You should see how highway patrolmen react to the sight of a turban and beard passing through middle America. Flying is also far safer.]

Is this paranoia or simple prudence? If you think I’m overly cautious, consider the case of Bob Rajcoomar, a U.S. citizen and Lt. Colonel in the United States Army Reserve who was detained on a flight in August 2002 because federal air marshals did not “like the way he looked.” [Hat Tip: RC]

Dr. Rajcoomar’s disturbing ordeal began shortly after take off during a flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia on August 31, 2002, when U.S. Air Marshals were called to subdue an apparently disoriented man seated in the coach section. The air marshals rushed at the unstable individual, handcuffed him, and then dragged him to the first-class section, where they placed him in the seat next to Dr. Rajcoomar, a U.S. citizen and Lt. Colonel in the United States Army Reserve and is of Indian descent. Dr. Rajcoomar asked to have his seat changed and the flight attendant obliged. [Link]

Dr. Rajcoomar’s seat change made the air marshals suspicious:

… after the flight landed … air marshals handcuffed Dr. Rajcoomar without explanation and took him into the custody of Philadelphia police. His wife Dorothy, who was also on the flight, was given no information on what had happened to her husband. Because the authorities confiscated Dr. Rajcoomar’s cellular phone, she had no way to contact him.

After four tense hours in detention, Dr. Rajcoomar was released. TSA personnel told him that he had been detained because air marshals on board the flight did not “like the way he looked.” [Link]

Mutineer anti-favorite Toral Mehta is on the Apprentice again tonight. Joy. ;) Actually, I should’ve seen this coming; Rebecca had the most ridiculous soft shpot for her friend Toral, a.k.a. the woman who established herself as a righteous defender of the Hindu faith with her refusal to don a costume.

Were any of you watching while I was? I thought Carolyn’s eyes were going to turn Rebecca to stone when she made such a controversial pick for her team of three assistants, but that’s just me. Mais oui, the only female contender left resumed her familiar stoic, I-might-be-wrong-about-this- but-I’m-going-to-nod-emphatically schtick. Oh yeah, since the finale is a two-parter, you get some Toral NEXT week, too. Chrismukkah comes early this year, truly.

Related: Uno, Dos, Tres, Cuatro

Back in July, Manish posted about the killing of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes that took place in the London Tube. He was a young, brown-skinned man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was shot in the head by police as a result of a series of unfortunate events. Manish titled his post Rashomon on the Tube. “Rashomon” was a reference to an Akira Kurosawa film in which people that witnessed the same incident had all reported seeing different things. When I read that air marshals had shot and killed Rigoberto Alpizar at the Miami airport yesterday, the first thing I thought of was de Menezes. Early reports said that the man was frantic, trying to run, mentioned a bomb, and reached into his bag just prior to being shot. I tried to put myself in the position of the air marshals. It would have been a tough choice, but I would have probably fired as well. When reports later surfaced that the man’s wife was yelling that he was “bi-polar” and “off his meds” I had to pause. The air marshals should have considered this, but its still a judgement call in my opinion. The latest news however makes me think that this is “Rashomon” all over again. Time Magazine reports:

At least one passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 924 maintains the federal air marshals were a little too quick on the draw when they shot and killed Rigoberto Alpizar as he frantically attempted to run off the airplane shortly before take-off.

“I don’t think they needed to use deadly force with the guy,” says John McAlhany, a 44-year-old construction worker from Sebastian, Fla. “He was getting off the plane.” McAlhany also maintains that Alpizar never mentioned having a bomb.

“I never heard the word ‘bomb’ on the plane,” McAlhany told TIME in a telephone interview. “I never heard the word bomb until the FBI asked me did you hear the word bomb. That is ridiculous.” Even the authorities didn’t come out and say bomb, McAlhany says. “They asked, ‘Did you hear anything about the b-word?’” he says. “That’s what they called it.”

Look at the striking similarities in these cases (besides their pictures):

1. Both men were killed in the name of protecting citizens from terrorism and turned out to be innocent.
2. Both men ran from, and were fired upon by plain clothes law enforcement officers.
3. Both men were of South American ancestry.
4. In both cases witnesses describe facts which contradict the first reports from the authorities.

One of my favorite holiday traditions is our annual national battle about the character of the nation. Are we the Christian nation of the “first settlers” or the secular nation of the barely theistic founding fathers? Since 20% of Americans do not identify as Christian, how do we find common ground with the rest of America?

One way is through holiday hymns/song. Let’s face it, many traditional hymns and carols are as catchy as Puritan cuisine is tasty. I went to an elementary school where our annual assembly had both Christian and Jewish songs; the nation’s capital goes one step further with the annual interfaith concert at Washington National Cathedral:

Hindu and Sikh hymns echoed through the Washington National Cathedral as nine world religions filled the building, a usual venue for Presidential prayers … Led by Washington’s Guru Gobind Singh Foundation (GGSF) executive director Rajwant Singh, 35 Sikh men and women in spotless white with saffron satin scarves around their necks said opening prayers at the 26th Interfaith Concert held by the Interfaith Conference.

The Kuchipudi Dance Academy represented the Hindu faith as its troupe presented a recital in honour of Lord Shiva.

The Buddhists also took part in the event for the first time, with three Sri Lankan monks from Washington’s Buddhist Vihara joining the annual celebrations recently.

More than 1,400 members in the audience also enjoyed interludes of tabla maestro Rajinder Pal Singh, a student of Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain.

The annual concert aims at bringing together Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Sikh communities on a common platform. [Link]

I’m waiting for William A. Donohue to protest against this invasion of a Christian space. After all, if this guy finds the White House insufficiently Christian, what will he think of Hindu dancers in the National Cathedral?

Deepak Chopra is coming out with his own interpretation of the Kama Sutra (thanks, Cicatrix). What a coincidence! I was just telling myself, ‘You know what I need for the holidays? I need to read a sex book by a guy who could be my father.’

Since you never read the paperback Kama Sutra that you got as a gag gift for your 21st birthday, I’ll break it down for you: some parts of Vatsyayana’s sex manual for virgins have all the charm of a Sears catalog.

When the skin is pressed down on both sides, it is called the `swollen bite’. When a small portion of the skin is bitten with two teeth only, it is called the `point’. When such small portions of the skin are bitten with all the teeth, it is called the `line of points’. The biting, which is done by bringing together the teeth and the lips, is called the `coral and the jewel’. The lip is the coral, and the teeth the jewel. When biting is done with all the teeth, it is called the `line of jewels’. [Link]

And when you smack her on the ass, it is called the ‘last time you get play.’ But some parts are good advice:

… the signs of her want of enjoyment and of failing to be satisfied are as follows: … she does not let the man get up, feels dejected, bites the man, kicks him… [Link]

If your partner kicks you while you’re in bed, it’s a safe bet that you’re doing something wrong. So I look forward to hearing Chopra’s hypnotic voice on the audiobook:

Listen to my voice — you are getting very horny

The WaPo reports that software and services are great bootstrap industries because, unlike heavy manufacturing and chip fabs, they don’t have a lot of dependencies on infrastructure (via Globalisation Institute):

Chennai also shows why India succeeds in software and services. To do software, you only need one functional buildingTo do software, you don’t need a broad infrastructure base; you need one functional building. I visited Tidel Park, a gleaming office block here that houses 31 software firms, two-thirds of which are foreign. There aren’t any power cuts here because the building has its own backup generators. There are no connectivity worries because it is served by six competing broadband providers. And it certainly is safe. Tidel Park boasts 150 guards and a security control room that would not look out of place on Darth Vader’s Death Star. [Link]

However, eventually you need a manufacturing base and the ability to generate economies of scale. The khadi cloth era of protecting domestic industries only made them sluggish and unresponsive and postponed global competitiveness. Relative to centralized planning, few of India’s early leaders understood adaptive systems or emergent effects:

… the opening of India’s economy has forced its manufacturers to reinvent themselves. Chennai’s auto-components firms have done this almost manically. Ten years ago, their brakes and valves were crummy enough to scare away the international car majors that considered manufacturing in India. Today, you can’t spend an hour with any of the components Actually, getting rid of the tariff barriers is where you startfirms without hearing about the international quality certifications they’ve amassed; the Deming Prize, awarded for manufacturing excellence by a Japanese committee, has acquired talismanic status… the city’s business leaders pepper their conversation with Japanese management lingo.

The results are dramatic. The TVS Group, the largest of India’s auto-components firms, now exports around a third of its output — proof that it meets international standards. The rival Rane Group reports that it has reduced defects from 10,000 parts per million to 250 and that 28 percent of its engine valves are now exported. One of the TVS companies, Sundram Fasteners, has won a General Motors “Supplier of the Year” award five times, and it supplies 100 percent of GM’s radiator caps.

StrategyPage has an update on the latest snag affecting post-quake relief efforts in Pakistan -

Under pressure from Islamic conservative politicians, Pakistan agreed to get [out] NATO troops, performing relief work in the earthquake zone, within 90 days. There are about a thousand NATO troops involved in the relief operations. The Islamic conservatives find this very embarrassing, with all those infidel (non-Moslem) soldiers in a Moslem country. Many conservative clerics are preaching that it is better to suffer and die from privation, than to tolerate infidel soldiers in your neighborhood. Thousands of people in the earthquake zone face death, as the brutal Winter weather has closed in. The NATO troops have the most helicopters and other high tech gear to get aid to people who need it most. European governments are trying to get civilian specialists into the area, to replace the departing troops.

These pressures are the same reason last weekend’s Predator strike on a senior Al Qaeda leader was initially pitched by the Pakistani’s as the product of a bungled bomb -

Pakistan declared that Harethi died when a bomb he was assembling went off. But people in the are displayed missile fragments, including data plates that said “AGM-114.” That’s a Hellfire missile, normally fired from CIA Predator UAVs known to operate in the area. The Pakistani government does not like to admit it allows the CIA to fly armed UAVs freely around Pakistan, but it does.

Tis a delicate dance when you’re barely sovereign over your own country & don’t want to admit that others (infidels, no less) are in there cleaning up your mess. Pakistani newspapers do seem to be talking pretty readily about the big secret -

“For their part, it is not surprising that the Pakistanis would deny that Rabia was taken out by a US missile. Although the government of Pakistani President Gen Pervez Musharraf is one of Washington’s most valuable allies in the war on terrorism, anti-American sentiment in the country runs high. Public acknowledgement that US drones are operating over Pakistan and launching missiles could direct that sentiment toward Musharraf,” he points out.

In the meantime, it appears that Amartya Sen’s dictum that the ultimate source of modern hunger is politics, not poverty may find a sad new proofpoint.

Sixty-four years ago today, Japan kicked off its Pacific Ocean campaign by attacking Pearl Harbor. The Pacific war led to the starvation of three million Bengalis by the British and the bombing of Calcutta. It also paved the way for Indian independence.

The Japanese raided the Howrah Bridge in Calcutta, attacked British ships in the Indian Ocean, and occupied parts of Assam and the Andaman Islands. Indian forces under British command fought back in Burma, and British bombers based in Bengal raided Japan.

Mitsubishi Zero: Suicide bomber

Several areas in India anticipated Japanese bombing:

Their air force bombers had already dropped a few bombs on Calcutta, the biggest city of India at that time, and on the naval station at Vishakapatnam on the east coast. There was a bomb scare in Madras city which was to the south of Vishakapatnam on the east coast. There were blackouts and air raid practices in all the big cities of India, including Bangalore City, where an aircraft factory was being built up with the help of the Americans… [Link]

A survivor recalls the bombing of Calcutta:

I remember the bombing of Calcutta by the Japanese, the target being Howrah Bridge. That morning had been a lovely clear and breezy day and we were flying kites…Our hero was an Indian Air Force Hurricane pilot who, night after night, shot down Zeros

We all had duties to perform when the siren would sound, such as putting a small bag with a piece of black rubber, Vaseline and bandages around our shoulders. We had no fridge in those days and drinking water was stored in earthen jars on the veranda. When the siren sounded that day, my parents brought in the water jars and my sisters and I ran downstairs to the ground floor and hid in the air raid shelter… When the “all clear” siren sounded we would leave the shelters and look at the damage… The bombing of Calcutta led to an exodus of residents - Howrah and Sealdah Stations being packed with people trying to get out. [Link]

Gold. The metal is synonymous with Indian culture. All the aunties that are shamelessly pressuring us younger folk to get married, are really doing so simply because it will provide them occasion to sport their bling. When my mom travels overseas she always calls me to have “the talk:”

“Abhi-beta, if something happens take care of your brother. You know where we keep the family gold right?”

She proceeds to tell me in laborious detail about the many locations, safety deposit boxes, etc., where the family jewels are kept. I shouldn’t even mention the map to the dig site in the forest behind our house. The Christian Science Monitor reports that India’s obsession with Au is actually weighing down the growth of the Indian economy:

In India, nearly all that glitters is, in fact, gold. With a stockpile already worth $200 billion, Indian gold purchases jumped nearly 40 percent this year, making the country the world’s leading consumer of the precious metal.

Gold may seem like a savvy investment as its value hits a 22-year high. But experts say it may actually be weighing down one of Asia’s fastest rising economies. It would be better if the money locked up in the glistening yellow metal went instead to finance new start-ups or better roads, boosting the Indian economy over the long term, economists contend.

That could provide quite a boost, given that the amount Indians have saved in gold - mostly as jewelry - is worth 30 percent of the country’s $690 billion economy. But Indians have a deep cultural soft spot for the soft metal - something that may hinder new efforts to introduce more modern investment strategies for India’s burgeoning middle class.

“It’s fair to say India’s economic growth would be higher if the money tied up in gold was invested more productively,” says Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute in San Francisco.

But really now, how are you going to convince those aunties that giving up the gold is better for their society? I myself am a silver man. I especially like it on my kaju-katli.

…earlier this year there was a mini gold rush in Tamil Nadu, where people affected by last year’s tsunami put up to half the aid money they had received into gold jewelry,” Ms. Leyland says. “They could wear it, keep it safe, and it was in a form where it couldn’t be frittered away.”

Worries over security aren’t restricted to poorer or displaced Indians, however. The country’s growing middle class is still skeptical of financial investments and even bank deposits, preferring physical assets like gold and property.

There is definitely going to be a generational conflict over the gold in my family. My mom made me a gold Om chain a long time ago but I never wear it. I’m always afraid I will lose it and I just never thought gold was that attractive (one of the many reasons I am a bad Indian son). I have always admired gold for its more pragmatic uses.

This year’s South Asian International Film Festival kicks off tonight in Manhattan with Hari Om featuring Cicatrix’ favorite, Vijay Raaz. Here’s the full program. The festival lasts through Sunday, Dec. 11.

Widely touted as one of the best films to come out of India in the last decade, Hari Om takes us on an unforgettable tour of Rajasthan as an autorickshaw driver and a French tourist set out on a cross-cultural journey through the beautiful region looking for a glimpse of the “real” India…

Selections from the top-shelf roster include: Being Cyrus, a dark comedy about a Parsi family featuring Bollywood megastar Saif Ali Khan in his English-language debut, and The Blue Umbrella, director Vishal Bhardwaj’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his 2003 masterwork, Maqbool. Both Cyrus and Umbrella were the subjects of a New York Times feature piece last week extolling the rise of New Wave Bollywood, which departs from song-and-dance conventions to present a fresh look at Indian society…

Other featured selections include: Kya Kool Hai Hum, the sleeper Bollywood superhit; Sancharram (The Journey), Liga Pullapully’s controversial depiction of lesbian love in an idyllic Kerala village; Bachelor, the hit romantic comedy from Bangladesh; Naked In Ashes, the acclaimed documentary about a young yogi; and Kal, Ruchi Narain’s revelatory look at Indian youth. SAIFF is also proud to present a special program for children on Saturday, December 10th, featuring the family films Duratta from Bangladesh about a runaway tyke, and Hanuman, the animated box-office hit from India. [SAIFF press release]

Being Cyrus on Thursday night looks promising.

Related posts: Indo indie, Dueling film festivals in Manhattan, Film festival hosts 14 South Asian premieres in New York

Congrats to reader chick pea on her tongue-in-cheek ‘wedding’

Huevos don’t last forever

TN boy and I made a pact 10 years ago, that we’d get married if we hadn’t or had anything cooking by the age of 30. Well, a few weeks ago, he turned 30, I left him a voicemail to wish him a Happy Birthday along with a message of how he wanted the invitations to look :).

… I just got an email from him (he’s now also a doctor, and a busy resident in NYC) that he’d have to brush up on his Gujarati skills, and to have the wedding planned, as we must now get married….and to hurry it along since the deal breaks by age 31… too funny, too funny, too funny.

So people, help me plan a quick wedding, simple, short, and sweet. [Link]

To everyone else, who was your marriage pact with, and how did it turn out?

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

— Balwinder Shaikh’s Pir in Amrit

Mama Beeb reports that India is putting together an ayurpedia to fight inappropriate patents in developed countries (via Slashdot): Claim: 80% of U.S. patents on medicinal plants by 2000 were of Indian origin

In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100 doctors are hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts… One of them is Jaya Saklani Kala, a young ayurveda doctor, who is wading through a dog-eared 500-year-old text book for information on a medicine derived from the mango fruit…. putting together a 30-million-page electronic encyclopædia of India’s traditional medical knowledge…

Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who is leading the traditional wealth encyclopaedia project… reckons that of the nearly 5,000 patents given out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin… … in most of the developed nations like United States, “prior existing knowledge” is only recognised if it is published in a journal or is available on a database…

Mogambo is displeased

The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia of the country’s traditional medicine in five languages - English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish - in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them. The electronic encyclopædia, which will be made available next year, will contain information on the traditional medicines, including exhaustive references, photographs of the plants and scans from the original texts…

… ayurvedic texts are in Sanskrit and Hindi, unani texts are in Arabic and Persian and siddha material is in Tamil language… there are some 54 authoritative ‘text books’ on ayurveda alone, some thousands of years old… [Link]

My former boss visited the big don today. I got these Bill and Melinda Gates pictures in email followed by a message from ‘Hotmail staff’ telling me ‘your account is nearly full.’

Xbox Diwali Extreme is amazingly lifelike in high def

Cappuccino with Sonia

I loved this suggestion from the thread on Chrismahanukwanzakah:

All Mixed Up - i sort of have a soft spot for christmas trees… i think they’re fun. when i have kids i’m going to decorate my tree with Om ornaments and little sita, ganesha, and ram ornaments…and my tree is going to be topped with a flute playing krishna. [okay i probably won’t do that…but it was a fun picture to paint in my head].

Not mixed up after all - I actually did that last year. Put up a tree with ornaments and bulbs and topped it with a silver idol of Krishna playing the flute…My “Krishmas” tree :-)

Yes, despite what you might have thought after reading my grumping about the made-up “discrimination” against Christians, I celebrate Christmas and have done so for years. My mom claims that when we were very little, she would give us gifts on Diwali instead (supposedly some people do this for Pancha Ganapati), but we would cry at Christmas because we didn’t get presents then. As they couldn’t easily afford two gift-giving seasons back then, my parents opted to assimilate a bit more and get in on this Christmas thing, and now that they’re better off, we go for the full materialist extravaganza of gifts, food and travel.

But thanks to William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the man who got Wal-Mart to fire the poor schmuck who knew about Christmas’s pagan origins (and now is launching a boycott of Land’s End), I might have to give up Christmas.