I’m off to Bombay for a few months for a change of scene. (Switches to the deep sepia ink and sharpens the nib.) If I don’t come back in waxed chest, brown highlights and mirrored shades yelling ‘call me, yaar!’ into a trick GSM, I’ll be deeply disappointed.

These juths were made for walkin’

Some of you have asked why I spend far less time slamming Bollycheese than American exoticism. The answer is that I walk past the exoticism every day. Now the lazy susan turns, the juthi is on the other foot, &c., &c. Sunil Shetty, a.k.a. Funky Hunky, you’re goin’ down.

I’ve gotten some great advice from Mumbaikars who are big fans of our ‘South Asian’ blog. They told me the best place to live is east Mumbai, stay out of Colaba because it’s not safe after dark, and if you’re on the Bandstand late at night and a policeman approaches you, pinch his buttocks — it’s a friendly Mumbai greeting. They also told me Parsis are the poorest Mumbaikars, Haji Ali sells authentic electronics, the women’s carriage is the safest way to travel and the best time to avoid traffic is from 3 to 6 pm on Marine Drive.

Please god, let me survive the Sepia readers of Bombay.

Related post: Livin’ la vida Sepia

As Dave mentioned earlier, the lawyer arguing one of the most important cases in front of the Supreme Court right now is a desi - Neal Kumar Katyal.

The future Justice Katyal?

At a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution on the Senate hearings on Judge Roberts, moderator Stuart Taylor, a columnist for the National Journal, pointedly asked panelist Katyal if a future Democratic president nominated him to the Supreme Court, which could well be, would he also be as evasive as Roberts was at the hearings?… [Link]

To give you a sense of why this is a plausible conjecture, here are just some of the highlights from his resume:

• He clerked for both Justice Breyer and Judge Guido Calabresi of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He also worked for now Justice Roberts the summer after he graduated from Yale Law. [Link]
• “In 1998-99, Katyal served as National Security Adviser to the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice” [Link]
• “He … served as Vice President Al Gore’s co-counsel in the Supreme Court election dispute of 2000” [Link]
• He “represented the Deans of most major private law schools in the University of Michigan affirmative-action case” that was settled in 2003. [Link]
• In 2004, he was responsible for the case that “struck down the Guantanamo trial system as unconstitutional and a violation of the Geneva Conventions.” [Link]
• In 2005, at age 34, Katyal was named one of the the leading “40 lawyers under 40” by the National Law Journal
• He is listed as a speaker by ICM, one of the largest literary and talent agencies around. They also represent Mel Gibson, Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster.
• Even with all the time he spends in court, he’s a Professor at Georgetown Law.
• And yes, ladies, he’s married. That means even his Punjabi parents are happy!

Katyal is the lead lawyer in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Amrit Singh is one of the lawyers involved in Ali et. al. v. Rumsfeld, and Vanita Gupta argued the Tulia case. Looks like we’re doing alright in terms of representing in the field of civil liberties, no?

Related posts: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, The art of the book review, The “Devils” Advocates

This NYT story on the reimportation of cheap college textbooks from India misses the entire, delicious point: Americans line up as huge fans of globalization when the money saved goes to them rather than their employers (thanks, WGIIA).

Over the last few years, many American students… have been buying American textbooks printed in India, as word has spread of the larger savings available… The textbooks are printed legally in India under copyright arrangements worked out over the last decade by American and British publishers. Americans are huge fans of globalization — when they’re making the moneyUsing tax breaks and cheap labor, Indian companies publish the books in black-and-white, low-quality paperback editions, and sell them for as little as 10 percent of the cost of the same book in the United States. But under the licensing agreement, the books may be sold only on the Indian subcontinent and in surrounding countries…

There are no penalties for students who import books for their own use, under a 1998 Supreme Court decision that ruled that manufacturers who sell goods more cheaply overseas than in the United States have no protection against having their products sold back to the American market. [Link]

The other interesting point here is the same problem intellectual property publishers have been facing for decades: differential pricing is not sustainable in an efficient market. You can’t sell Microsoft Windows for 10% the cost in India because Americans will import the lower-price version. And you can’t sell it at full cost and expect decent sales in a developing country, only the rich will buy. All you can do is segment the market with a lower-featured edition.

And that’s exactly what these textbook publishers have done. The problem is, students are satisfied with the lower-quality editions because hardly anyone buys textbooks for pleasure, especially not at $150 a pop.

Related post: Stuck with the 50cc Bajaj

Sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling, a pioneer in the cyberpunk genre, is also a huge Bollyfan who designed this bumper sticker (via Boing Boing):

That’s Parineeta on the right, not sure about the one on the left. The guy’s got taste.

He’s also been blogging the ins and outs of various sex-lies-and-mirrordiscs scandals (Sanjay Joshi, Amar Singh) working their way through political parties and the Indian Parliament:

Sanjay Joshi was set up. Somebody videoed him inflagrante diplimatico with a schoolteacher — bad news if your job in a conservative religious party depends on a vow of celibacy. Days later, flamboyant socialist playboy Amar Singh, of the liberal Samajwadi Party, announced his phone had been tapped. A salacious CD of purported chats with Tolly- and Bolly-wood starlets soon began making the rounds (hey, he’s a flamboyant socialist playboy).

In quick succession, more than half a dozen prominent ministers and pols stepped forward with claims that they too had been filmed, shadowed and bugged. More than a few signs point to a dirty tricks arm of the ruling Congress Party, with rumblings of deep-pocketed corporate backing. A crew of snoops for hire, black-hat script kiddies and renegade telco underlings has been rounded up and are under the screws. Meanwhile, the Sanjay sex tape is the hottest DVD bootleg on the market, and rumors of many more discs compromising many more pols abound… [Link]

His blog posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21

Related post: One ticket for the clue train, please

Forbes magazine reports on an article first published in the German magazine Cicero which asserts that the Pakistanis are helping the Saudis develop a nuclear capability under the cover of the Haj:

…during the Haj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia.

Between October 2004 and January 2005, some of them slipped off from pilgrimages, sometimes for up to three weeks, the report quoted German security expert Udo Ulfkotte as saying.

According to Western security services, the magazine added, Saudi scientists have been working since the mid-1990s in Pakistan, a nuclear power since 1998.

Cicero, which will appear on newstands tomorrow, also quoted a US military analyst, John Pike, as saying that Saudi bar codes can be found on half of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons ‘because it is Saudi Arabia which ultimately co-financed the Pakistani atomic nuclear program…’ [Link]

If this is true then it is a total slap in the face of the U.S., and the assurances that we supposedly have (right?) about Khan’s network being shut down is all bulls*it. Allowing a nation like Saudi Arabia any sort of nuclear capability is crazy, especially if you think that the monarchy there is doomed to failure and that a militant uprising is just a matter of time. Also, it’s not like they have an un-met energy demand.

The magazine also said satellite images indicate that Saudi Arabia has set up a program in Al-Sulaiyil, south of Riyadh, a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles. [Link]

We’ll have to keep an eye on this to see if any other news organizations follow-up on the German assertions.

Update: Pakistan rejects accusations. See below the fold.

Sri Lankans Saluja Thangaraja, who is now 26, and Ahilan Nadarajah have been sitting in a U.S. Federal pen for 4 years now. Why? They are victims in a sense of the politics that resulted from 9/11. The SJ Mercury news picks this off the AP wire:

A Sri Lankan woman fleeing persecution in her native country has been released after spending more than four years in federal detention on allegations that she entered the country illegally.

Saluja Thangaraja, 26, was freed from the Otay Mesa detention center late Monday after the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the release of a Sri Lankan man who also spent more than four years in the same facility.

The court ordered the release of Ahilan Nadarajah on March 17, saying the government was violating federal law by holding him even though he wasn’t criminally charged and couldn’t be deported in the foreseeable future.

Nadarajah and Thangaraja both fled Sri Lanka and stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border in October 2001 and were charged with being in the U.S. without a valid visa. Both were granted political asylum but the government refused to release them.

In case you are keeping score at home, this is yet another example of the Executive Branch selectively ignoring the power of the Judicial Branch in the name of “protecting” Americans. The fact that these two were stopped at the Mexican border may have incentivized the government to over-prosecute this case so as to justify their specious arguments connecting illegal immigration on the Mexican border to terrorism. Thangaraja and Nadarajah were kept in jail while the original ruling was appealed by the government. As you have probably already guessed, the U.S. government insisted these two were LTTE terrorists despite evidence to the contrary.

A brand-new tea bar called Tavalon just opened by Union Square in Manhattan. It sells high-end loose leaf teas in a microscopic but slick storefront decked out like a lounge. The founders are young corporate law dropouts, a turbaned Sikh dude named Sonny Caberwal and his biz partner John-Paul Lee. Sonny is also a tabla-ista who rocked out on a Thievery Corporation album a couple of years ago. It’s the second gen version of the ‘I’ll open a little restaurant’ dream:

There’s a new wave of Indian restaurants as lifestyle businesses being started by young, desi Manhattan professionals. Indian Bread Company, Chinese Mirch, and their granddaddy, Kati Roll Co., remind me of the second wave of upscale restaurants in London’s Brick Lane; they’re slicker than the usual desi joint… As young restaurants, owners, friends and relatives still work behind the counter… educated urbanites… A lot of the initial marketing of these places goes through word of mouth, friends of friends in the high-speed desi network; it’s the ‘I’ll open a little restaurant’ dream made real. [Link]

The place is decorated with white tile in a fabric texture like Tamarind, white orchids, uplit shelves like a cosmetics counter and menus on 32” LCDs. It sells teas in tins and test tubes. My buddies DD Pesh spun in the DJ perch yesterday, and Sonny played stand-up tabla by the door.

The teas themselves mimic vitamin water with frou-frou, we’re-not-Lipton themes like anti-aging, energizing and balancing. The bar also carries some wicked-looking paraphernalia including a tea stick, a perforated, stainless steel cylinder which you fill with loose leaf tea; stainless steel honey spoons shaped like honeycombs; and sinuous, double-sided sugar spoons. It’s all very SoHo-boho chic (tongue-in-cheek).

They’ve got a blend called Ceylon King for the days you’re feeling Ravanous. Thankfully, they don’t carry any redundant-dundant ‘chai tea,’ but do stop by and give Sonny shit for his ‘secret Indian spices’

Kama Chai Sutra: … teas just don’t get any more flavorful than this organic chai, made with a secret blend of Indian spices.

Three million people marched in France today against a labor flexibility bill, possibly the largest protests in the history of modern France. It’s the kind of reaction you’d expect in Bengal:

The marches were part of a nationwide day of action against the Villepin legislation, which was intended to encourage hiring by making it easy for companies to fire workers under age 26 during their first two years on the job. [Link]

“It is a collective failure of the French system,” said Louis Chauvel, a sociologist who studies generational change. “You earn more doing nothing in retirement at the age of 60 to 65 than working full-time at the age of 35…”

… A sweeping survey of people in 22 countries released in January found that France was alone in disagreeing with the premise that that the best economic model is “the free enterprise system and free market economy.” [Link]

According to the poll cited above, more Indians believe in a free market economy than even the Brits, Germans or French. China tops the poll, and France sits at the bottom.

Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments: “In one sense we are indeed facing what has been called ‘the end of history,’ in that there is now an extraordinary level of consensus about the best economic system.” [Link]

My theory is that rapid development gives people faith in the redemptive power of the invisible hand. The poll was conducted in India’s major cities, so urbanites support liberalization. But the poll says nothing about the voter-heavy heartland.

As I write this post, the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing oral argument in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, an important case involving the president’s constitutional and statutory authority in times of war, and the legality of military commissions set up to try detainees captured in the war on terror. The facts of the case:

Petitioner Salid Ahmed Hamdan is a detainee being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 and admits to being a personal bodyguard and driver to Osama bin Laden. He was charged with conspiring to commit acts of terrorism, and was to be tried before a military commission, which is a special adjudicatory body created by Presidential order to try individuals accused of war crimes. [Link]

The procedural history, or how the present case made its way to the Supreme Court:

Before trial, Hamdan challenged the lawfulness of the military commission that was to try him, and in November 2004, the D.C. District Court enjoined the military commission proceedings as illegal under the Geneva Convention and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed, holding that military commissions had been duly authorized by Congress; that relief was unavailable under the Geneva Convention because it did not create privately enforceable rights and because it did not apply to Al Qaeda; and that the UCMJ did not preclude Hamdan’s trial before military commissions. [Link]

Hamdan appealed to the Supreme Court and in November 2005, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case. Chief Justice John Roberts recused himself, as he served on the D.C. Circuit Court panel that upheld the war crimes tribunals. (Some are calling for Justice Antonin Scalia to step aside as well because of comments he recently made in Switzerland, see here.)

Respected desi law professor Neal Katyal is arguing the case on behalf of Hamdan. There are two questions (.pdf) before the Supreme Court. The first is a threshold inquiry regarding the Court’s jurisdiction to hear the case. The government contends that the Court should dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds:

[The government] argue[s] that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA), enacted by Congress after the Supreme Court granted certiorari in this case, preclude pre-trial review by establishing an exclusive post-trial review process for all Guantanamo detainees. In addition, the Government has argued, even absent the DTA, the Court should withhold ruling on the merits until a final decision has been reached in accordance with traditional abstention doctrine. Petitioner, on the other hand, argues that Congress specifically modified the effective date provisions of the DTA to ensure that the Supreme Court could decide this case.[Link]

petitioner argues [in part] that the military commission that seeks to try him is not authorized to do so under U.S. law. [H]e argues that such authorization must be explicitly provided by Congress. Respondents dispute whether such explicit authorization is required, pointing to the historical practice of the President convening military commissions as evidence of his inherent “Commander-in-Chief” power to do so. [Link]

Dave’s post about the British Raj reminded me about the seamy underside of the British East India Company, namely its business in drugs. Imperial trade in opium was central to the success of the British empire:

Indian opium helped the British rule the world

By the early part of the nineteenth century, British Indian opium had stanched the flow of New World silver into China, replacing silver as the commodity that could be exchanged for Chinese tea and other goods…Opium revenues in India not only kept the colonial administration afloat, but sent vast quantities of silver bullion back to Britain. The upshot was the global dominance of the British pound sterling until World War I… [the] data supports, without opium the British global empire is virtually unimaginable. [Link]

The British energetically encouraged poppy growing, on occasion coercing Indian peasant farmers into going over the crop. By the end of the 1830s the opium trade was already, and was to remain, “the world’s most valuable single commodity trade of the nineteenth century.”(4)… [Link]

The definition of a drug cartel is a group with a monopoly on the distribution of an illegal narcotic. The empire, in the form of the East India Company, fits the bill quite neatlyWithout opium the British global empire is virtually unimaginable:

In 1773, the Governor-General of Bengal was granted a monopoly on the sale of opium, and abolished the old opium syndicate at Patna. For the next 50 years, opium would be key to the British East India Company’s hold on India. Since importation of opium into China was illegal … the British East India Company would … sell opium at auction in Calcutta on the condition it was smuggled to China. In 1797, the company ended the role of local Bengal purchasing agents and instituted the direct sale of opium to the company by farmers.

In 1799, the Chinese Empire reaffirmed its ban on opium imports, and in 1810 the following decree was issued:
“Opium has a very violent effect… Opium is a poison… Its use is prohibited by law.” [Link]

Certainly, the British ended up doing many good things in India. Still, we should acknowledge that the roots of the British Raj lie in something as dirty and illicit as the Medellin cartel. That a bunch of dirty narcoterrorists could give birth to the world’s largest, and (relatively speaking) one of its more humane empires, is perplexing indeed.

A new book by historian David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006), “helps explain how [the British civil servants in India] pulled it off.”

In yesterday’s Washington Post, noted author and UN official Shashi Tharoor gave a generally favorable review of The Ruling Caste. In Tharoor’s view,

The Ruling Caste paints an arresting and richly detailed portrait of how the British ruled 19th-century India — with unshakeable self-confidence buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall…. [For example,] one 24-year-old district officer found himself in charge of 4,000 square miles and a million people [Link]

“We are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race.”

Few shared Queen Victoria’s “romantic feelings for ‘brown skins….’” Well into the 20th century, they spoke and wrote of the need to treat Indians as “children” incapable of ruling themselves.

What is missing, though, is any sense of an Indian perspective on these men and their work. What did the subjects of their administration think of them? Gilmour does not tell us. He glosses over the prejudice and casual racism of many ICS men.

Aside from Religion, few things have spilt more blood and ink than the battle of the sexes. Even those beholden to the most strict and twisted notions of piety recognize the one domain where the rules sometimes just don’t apply -

Mr. Moussaoui said there were times when a Muslim can lie without being immoral: to reconcile Muslims, to answer “yes” when a wife asks, “Am I beautiful?” and to carry out jihad.

Because any man knows that answering that question honestly is tantamount to jihad unto itself. Best to save that energy for a battle you might actually win.

Now while mere questions of spousal beauty allow for wiggle room, in a different corner of the world, we learn that divorce is rather literal -

A Muslim couple in India has been told by local Islamic leaders to separate after the husband “divorced” his wife in his sleep, the Press Trust of India reported.

Sohela Ansari told friends that her husband, Aftab, had uttered the word “talaq,” or divorce, three times in his sleep, according to the report published in newspapers on Monday.

When local Islamic leaders heard of the sleep talking, they said Aftab’s words constituted a divorce under an Islamic procedure known as “triple talaq.” The couple, married for 11 years with three children, were told they had to split.

Husbands and wives are known to lash out at small annoyances as a way of signalling something deeper; in this case, maybe it really was just the small annoyances -

A jobless man burned himself to death after his wife refused to serve him meat for dinner, Indian police said Sunday.

The wife, who works as a domestic, refused to cook meat, saying they could not afford it.

Irritated by this, Sanjivan locked her in the house before setting himself on fire outside.

Poor Sanjivan, if he only knew about the Triple Talaq.

Earlier Abhi posted about the booming hair trade at the main Venkateshwara temple in Tirupati. It turns out that the sale of devotees’ hair is only one of this massive temple’s revenue streams, which dwarf those of American megachurches. Other revenue streams include cash, gold and diamond donations, laddoo sales and e-hundi.

Tirupati

E-hundi? Yes, electronic donations. You can donate to the temple right from ATMs owned by Andhra Bank and State Bank of India. The lords work in mysterious ways, but especially at withdrawal time:

“Andhra Bank ATM cardholders can make payments into the `hundi’ of Lord Venkateswara of Tirumala, from any of the bank’s ATMs. All they have to do is insert their card, enter the amount to be credited to the hundi account and it would be done instantly. In future, the facility would be extended to make payments for railway reservations and other services…” [Link]

Tirupati is also the most visited temple in the world. It is estimated that more that 50,000 people visit the temple everyday; this makes it almost 19 million people in a year, almost double the estimated number of people visiting Vatican City… Tirupati is the second richest religious institution after the Vatican City… it usually takes anywhere from 2 to 40 hours, depending on the season, to get to the Sanctom sanctorum from the time one registers into the queue system. [Link - thanks, tef]

The temple staff alone amounts to a number of 18,000. [Link]

Hundi collections (cash donation by devotees) account for roughly one-third of the Tirupati trust’s income. It also earns substantial money from the sale of human hair (offered by devotees) and laddoos, apart from interest on bank deposits. [Link]

For added convenience, you can book religious pilgrimages at State Bank branches worldwide. Separation of temple and state, what?

The bank is in tie-up with the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams management on a package to get the various `sevas’ in Tirumala temple and cottages booked at any of the bank’s branches in the world. ’ `e-hundi’ is also part of the software, wherein a devotee can drop his offerings either in an ATM in the country or at the 52 overseas offices in 33 countries. [Link]

The bank was nationalised in 1955 with the Reserve Bank of India having a 60% stake. [Link]

Last weekend I saw Inside Man, currently the top movie in America. In Spike Lee’s excellent caper mystery, actor Waris Singh Ahluwalia explains the significance of the Sikh turban, covering your head in the presence of god, to the largest American audience to date. It’s very cool of Lee to carve out screen time for this exposition, and more such movies might reduce Sikh harassment in America.

The hollow men

On the other hand, Denzel Washington’s rejoinder (‘Bet you can catch a cab…’) feels like shuffling, not dancing. I didn’t catch Ahluwalia’s smack-back because the audience was laughing too hard at the turban-cabbie joke. Ick. Ahluwalia gets the lion’s share of the desi actors’ screen time. Reena Shah has a couple of seconds as a hostage, and Jay Charan is barely seen as a bank teller.

The movie opens with ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ from Dil Se, and Punjabi MC raps over an orchestra-enhanced mix during the closing credits. The inclusion of ‘Chaiyya’ has nothing to do with Hindi samples in hip-hop or Bombay Dreams — Lee draws directly from the source (thanks, mallika). At some point desi influence in American pop culture will melt in so thoroughly, it won’t even be worthy of remark. Then the Uighur-Americans will start blogging about how poorly they’re represented in popular American culture. Viva la Uighur Mutiny.

Viva la
Uighur MutinyThe flick reminds me of Gurinder Chadha’s newer movies: it’s a thoroughly commercial film, a bid for mainstream relevance which still shouts out to the brotherhood (minorities, blue-collar workers, Brooklyn and polyglot NYC). It finesses the task of melding social commentary, such as a violent Grand Theft Auto parody, with product placements galore. As unfocused as it is, just one of Lee’s movies gives you more to chew on than three normal Hollywood flicks. Unlike Chadha’s work, Inside Man objectifies women as much as She Hate Me reportedly did, with an extended joke about big tits.

From the newswire (thanks “Blue Mountain”) we see that the Broadcasting Board of Governors has decided to scale back some of its global Voice of America programming, seemingly to re-direct dollars to countries most in need of America’s voice.

This may come as a shock to millions of Hindi radio fans worldwide, Even as the Indo-US relationship scales a new peak, the popular Hindi service of the Voice of America seems all set to be closed down in six months, after being on air for more than four decades. In its annual budget, the Broadcasting Board of Governors has said it will close down VoA’s Hindi radio broadcasts along with four others—Turkish, Thai, Greek and Croatian. Although it is still under Congressional review, it is unlikely that the lawmakers would go against the board’s decision.

At the same time, VoA’s Urdu service is being increased to 18 hours a day, including a special six-hour broadcast for the tribal areas of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The duration of the Hindi service is one hour and 30 minutes. [Link]

This strikes me as short-sighted. What’s happening here is that the powers that be are shifting their dollars away from many of the countries in which VoA is popular and arguably effective, and is instead going to try and focus on immediate hotspots using more exciting forms of media (as exemplified by Radio Sawa and Al-Hurra TV). The Baltimore Sun has a nice op-ed outlining possible motivations behind these directed cuts and why they may be a bad idea:

The enemy media fire hard and fast, said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a recent speech, and we must return the fire just as fast. As an example, he cites the extensive coverage of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Why not respond, he asks, by reporting on the mass graves of Saddam Hussein’s victims - torture answering torture, as it were. And non-journalists may have to paid to do the job. It is a kind of shock and awe of the media, a crucial part of the war on terror…

The Voice of America, to be sure, does not do this, and therein lies the problem. Dismissed as old-fashioned, stodgy and slow-moving, it is slated for drastic cuts by the supervising Broadcast Board of Governors…

Since, comparatively speaking, it costs so little, what’s the problem? Many say it is political. Every administration in Washington tries to nudge VOA this way or that way politically, but the pressure exerted by the current administration is said to be unprecedented…

This interference is not unique to VOA. It reflects what has happened at the Pentagon and the CIA, where dissenters have been demoted, reassigned, fired or otherwise silenced. [Link]

The ToI claims two tourists from Morocco and the UAE were deported for making out in Mumbai. What say we pass the hat so the thin khaki line gets laid once in awhile?

Slapping hussies in Meerut

Ibtisay Lamyani, 27, and Alfasar Nasir Abdul Hussain Ali, 37, were visiting India separately and had met at the Gateway of India. They were necking near the Metro cinema junction on Tuesday afternoon when a woman constable from Azad Maidan police station decided to intervene. She warned them against indecent behaviour in a public place. [Link]

The ToI’s smug commentary mirrors the sourpuss constable:

When they argued back, she demanded they show their passports. As luck would have it Lamyani’s visa had expired… Not chastened in the least, they promptly got into a clinch again. [Link]

The female tourist saw the director’s cut of Bombay (now with behind-the-bars footage), and both tourists were deported:

The police then submitted a chargesheet to the court which convicted Lamyani to a day’s imprisonment… Ali was also fined. They were both deported to their respective countries on the same night. [Link]

India Welcomes You.

Related posts: Bitter much?, Do Not Touch!, No sex please, we’re Indian, There is no place to hide it in India, Sex (gasp) in India: juxtaposition, Those legs are weapons of mass distraction, apparently, Indian Maxim is out to save lives, Dress Code

I kept wanting to make our flash fiction extravaganza relevant to current events, but I couldn’t find songs in my music collection that I loved, which contained any of the following:

• -March
• -Madness
• -Sixteen
• -NO productivity thanks to bracketology and compulsive SM-refreshing

Since I just read Manish’s snide post about hackneyed, caffeinated metaphors, this granddaughter of a coffee-grower suddenly has java on her mind (but sadly, not in her tummy). As a result, unforgettable horns and Peggy Lee’s silken voice waft through my head and there we have it. A title for our weekly 55.

So, write your 55 perfect words about the potent potable I reference above OR its affect on animals (Wheeee!) or the “third place“-establishments which charge you far too much for the privilege of sipping something acrid which apparently came your way via fair trade. Or, ignore me completely and write about whatever strikes your fancy this Friday. As always, leave the next chapter of your oeuvre (or a link to where we might discover it) in the comments below. Thank you and remember, there’s no shame in drinking decaf, I don’t care WHAT anyone says. :D

It has recently come to my attention that amateur phone sexologist Salman Khan endorses Red Tape shoes:

Try walking a mile in his shoes

Khan launched the new collection from Red Tape… In sync with international fashion trends, Red Tape shoes spell attitude and are a style statement for all those who wear them. [Link]

Oh, they make a style statement, all right:

• You have to apply to own them
• There’s an 18-year waiting list
• You have to bribe a salesman to get them
• Communists prefer them
• The pair delivered is always the wrong size
• They trip you up when you wear them
• They breed in darkness
• You can’t discard them, you can only add to your collection

The Dutch like wooden shoes, Sicilians wear concrete shoes, but India Shines in Red Tape shoes. A spokesman said:

Added Mr. Pant, “… There are synergies between himself and the Red Tape brand and he is the right fit, we believe.” [Link]

Man, talk about bad branding. First of all, where’s Mr. Sandal? And second, I think you’ll agree that Khan makes a better spokesman for Blackbuck Jerky.

Related post: Jail Time for Salman Khan?

How many times have you seen a desi profile begin with a sexualized coffee metaphor?

Amir Khan, Starbucks menu item

[Boxer] Amir Khan is a slender 19-year-old with smooth skin the color of café con leche. [Link]

That particular style was original before Starbucks was big, when light-skinned black girls calling themselves ‘Mocha’ showed up on prime time to tease the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Only thing is, everyone now knows that coffee beans are actually harvested by poorly-paid brown people. Awkward.

Personally, I say we bring the brewless fuck back in style. It’s so darn cute, so dang-diggly underused, that the NYT should apply it to everyone they profile. And the metaphor should evaluate whether the subject is bangable, through coffeerotica.

‘Oscar de la Hoya is a 33-year-old with skin the color of espresso.

‘Avril Lavigne is a 21-year-old with skin the color of a double tall, no-whip vanilla latte.

‘Alan Greenspan is an 80-year-old with skin the color of curdled whipping cream.’

Hey, if you’re good, kick it up a notch into cocoarotica: milk chocolate, caramel, dark chocolate with almond bits. Make the paper of record sound as subtle as hip-hop lyrics. Bam, now we’re cookin’ with gas.

Related posts: We’ve got a live one!, Sakina’s Restaurant, Anatomy of a genre, M-m-me so hungry, Buzzword bingo

By now most people are aware that 33-year-old Canadian peace activist Harmeet Singh Sooden (who celebrates his birthday today), along with another Canadian and one Brit, got their first taste of freedom in months on Thursday:

NOW he looks like a “Gandhian peace activist.”

The three hostages were freed Thursday from a house west of Baghdad by a joint U.S.-British military operation. The kidnappers were not there.

“Right before the intervention, they (the hostages) were bound and then their captors left their building,” said Peggy Gish, a member of the Chicago-based Christian Peacemakers Teams.

The U.S. military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, said the 8 a.m. rescue from a “kidnapping cell” was based on information divulged by a man during interrogation only three hours earlier. The man was captured by U.S. forces on Wednesday night. [Link]

The operation to rescue the three hostages was led by British SAS and MI6 as detailed in an article at Canada.com:

CanWest News Service has learned the raid was prompted after the Special Air Service and MI6 — Britain’s commando unit and its spy agency — opened negotiations with a kidnapping network after studying hostage tapes released to Arab television stations. Eavesdropping teams also tried to intercept cellphone conversations between the kidnappers and Arab television journalists.

The Canadian contingent is believed to have included the elite Joint Task Force 2, who were, according to Stephen Harper, “fully engaged and fully aware of what was going on…” [Link]

Now for the controversy. If you listened to the news yesterday you probably noticed that the language used to describe this event varied greatly. Some news organizations and groups said the hostages were “released.” Others, including military officials, said that they were “freed” or “rescued.” If you’ll reacall, these three are members of Christian Peacemaker Teams who oppose the occupation of Iraq and the presence of military there. It would put them in a tough spot if they had to publicly thank the military for Thursday’s events. Using different set of words and phrases can allow these different groups (e.g. military, CPT, and journalists) to all put their own spin on the actual events. I’d like to know more about the facts.

In Toronto, CPT co-director David Pritchard described the news as “release” rather than a “rescue” throughout the day. He said the news sent CPT workers on “a roller coaster of emotions…” [Link]

From the SM newswire (thanks Aninda) we learn sad news of the passing of “the one and only,” possibly the last living witness to the original Sepoy Mutiny of 1857:

Rest in peace now homey, there’s a heaven for a G

A giant tortoise, thought to be more than 250 years old, has died of liver failure in Calcutta, India.

Named Addwaitya, which means the One and Only in Bengali, he had a long and storied history that goes back to the early days of the British colonial empire.

Historical records show he was caught by British sailors in the Seychelles Islands and carried to India where he was presented to Robert Clive, a rising star in the British East-India company. West Bengal Forest Minister Jogesh Barman said he spent many years on Clive’s estate before he retired to the local zoo in Calcutta about 130 years ago. [Link]

Interestingly the Times of India titles its article about Addwaitya’s passing, “Tortoise that saw Sepoy Mutiny dies.” Now because I blog for Sepia Mutiny I am going to eat that headline right up and not challenge it by pointing out that turtles usually don’t get caught up in insurrection or survey the ranks of the enemy.

The minister said details about Addwaitya’s early life showed that British sailors had brought him from the Seychelles islands and presented him to Clive, who was rising fast in the East India Company’s military hierarchy.

On Thursday, the tortoise’s enclosure wore a deserted look.

“This is a sad day for us. We will miss him very much,” a zoo keeper said. [Link]

Addwaitya was an Aldabra tortoise:

They are generally shy, though when agitated they often release a foul-smelling, musky liquid that can be targeted at enemies from up to 3 feet away. [Link]

We’ve actually been looking for a pet to guard our bunker.

One of the power dynamics that the U.S.-India nuclear-power deal will illuminate, is that between the Indian American community and Congress. How much power do “we” really have? Maybe a better question is who exactly are “we?” I have detailed in past posts my frustration over the fact that arguably the most powerful Indian American lobbying group, USINPAC, always steps up to represent the interests which matter most to the first generation, but largely fails to advocate my more mainstream issues and interests as a second generation Indian American. USINPAC is lobbying almost as hard as the government of India in support of this deal.

India is not solely depending on diplomacy to win the U.S. Congress’ backing for its civilian nuclear cooperation deal with Washington but also taking the help of lobbyists, a media report said…

A U.S.-based media organization reported that in the last fall, long before the visit of President George W Bush to India, the Indian Embassy in Washington had signed up two lobbying firms to “sell the deal”.

The Embassy has signed a $700,000 contract with Barbour, Griffith and Rogers, an outfit led by Robert Blackwill, U.S ambassador to India from 2001 to 2003, it said.

Besides, the Embassy is also paying $600,000 to Venable, a firm that “boasts” of former Democratic Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana as its point man. [Link]

And in case there was ever any doubt, lobbying is what makes things happen in Congress:

Six Republican senators endorsed the U.S.-India nuclear-power deal, as more than 20 foreign-policy specialists, including three former ambassadors to South Asia, urged Congress to approve the agreement.

Sens. George Allen of Virginia, Sam Brownback of Kansas, John Cornyn of Texas, Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Ted Stevens of Alaska bring a wide range of influence to the effort to win congressional approval of the agreement signed by President Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, according to the U.S. India Political Action Committee (USINPAC). [Link]

“This is an historic step for both countries and USINPAC stands with President Bush and Prime Minister Singh in moving this process forward. In fact, for the past eight months, USINPAC has aggressively worked to get key Members of Congress on board and we will not rest until this agreement is signed into law,” said Sanjay Puri, the Chairman of USINPAC. [Link]

On a related note, Indolink.com recently had a good article summarizing a 2004 paper titled: Subcontinental Divide Asian Indians and Asian American Politics by Wendy K. Tam Cho and Suneet P. Lad (subscription required for full paper). Cho and Lad examined both the facts and the myths of Indian American political power as judged by campaign contributions among other factors.

We’ve got a new inductee for the Exotica Hall of Shame. This Chicago Sun-Times review of a new Chicago pop opera called Sita Ram is out to set some kind of density record for exotica-spew on Desilandia (thanks, WGIIA):

Adding to the spicy flavor are Scott C. Neale’s brilliantly colored street signs of India, Mara Blumenfeld’s curry-tinted costumes (many imported from India), Chris Binder’s deft lighting, plus shadow puppets and exotic instruments. There are moments when it feels like you are watching a traveling troupe that has set up shop in the center of an Indian village, and you half expect a cow or water buffalo to wander through. [Link]

I see that Jai Uttal is involved in this project. Say no more.

“Sita Ram” is the creation of director-writer David Kersnar and Grammy-nominated composer and co-lyricist Jai Uttal… [Link]

Hedy Weiss, you are dead to me

Related posts: Sakina’s Restaurant, Anatomy of a genre, M-m-me so hungry, Buzzword bingo

Long-time mutineer KXB points us at a wonderfully written column by Peggy Noonan with her reflections on the classic Freedom at Midnight and its lessons as we grapple with Iraq -

I have been reading “Freedom at Midnight,” the popular classic of 30 years ago that recounted the coming of democracy to India. The authors, journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, capture the end of the Raj with sweep and drama, and manage to make even the dividing of India and Pakistan—I mean the literal drawing of the lines between the two countries, by a British civil servant—riveting. But the sobering lesson of this history, the big thing you bring away, is this: They didn’t know.

Mountbatten and Nehru and Jinnah were brilliant men who’d not only experienced a great deal; they’d done a great deal, and yet they did not know that the Subcontinent—which each in his own way, and sometimes it was an odd way, loved—would explode in violence, that bloodlust would rule as soon as the Union Jack was lowered.

…The only one who knew what was coming was Gandhi, mystic, genius and eccentric, who drove the other great men crazy by insisting on living among and ministering to the poor, the nonelite. He knew their hearts. He had given his life for a free and independent India but opposed partition and feared the immediate chaos it would bring. He spent the eve of Independence mourning. Six months later he was dead.

What follows is a wonderful, treatise one of the perils of leadership - distance. Noonan reminds us that elites across societies and throughout history walk a fine line between leading people to a better future vs. the folly of trying to impose a possibly unattainable ideal.

And yet, it’s an intrinsic curse of humanity that excess in the service of progress will always be a risk. The only surefire way to avoid any cost is to nihilistically abandon the quest itself.

Don’t blink or you might miss my 15 seconds of being hip and cool, but the Grey Lady’s fashion section informs us that the hottest look today is a full beard:

A bearded Ralph Lauren model. I look just like him, but more handsome, and with brown skin and a turban.

At hipster hangouts and within fashion circles, the bearded revolution that began with raffishly trimmed whiskers a year or more ago has evolved into full-fledged Benjamin Harrisons. At New York Fashion Week last month at least a half-dozen designers turned up with furry faces… [at] the John Bartlett show… more than half the models wore beards: untidy ones that scaled a spectrum from wiry to ratty to shabby to fully bushy. [Link]

Wow. For the last three decades, Americans have seen the beard as anathema. The very word means a person who diverts suspicion from someone in both the contexts of betting and sexual orientation. To grow a beard is seen as dishonest, or at the very least, career suicide:

… [A] study in Australia showed that 92% of women and 79% of men would rather not work with people who have facial hair. It also found that senior managers think beards make men look shifty, unattractive and too old. [Link]

Remember Al Gore? He grew a beard to signal the fact that he was a private person who had left public life, and he shaved it to signify that he was once again a political actor. Unlike in India, the American public doesn’t trust a bearded politician:

The last president to sport a mustache was William Taft, who served from 1909 to 1913, while the last bearded president, Benjamin Harrison, left office in 1893. [Link]

We have female senators and black senators, but we do not have a bearded senator… I believe that we will have a female president and a black president before we have another bearded president. [Link]

In 2000, a Muslim girl named Shabina Begum enrolled in Denbigh High School in Luton, England. The school required students to wear uniforms, and the uniforms were developed in consideration of the fact that approximately 80% of the students at Denbigh were Muslim:

In devising a suitable uniform, the school went to immense trouble to accommodate the religious and cultural preferences of the pupils and their families. There was consultation with parents, students, staff and the Imams of the three local mosques. One version of the uniform was the shalwar kameez (or kameeze), a sleeveless smock-like dress with a square neckline, worn over a shirt, tie and loose trousers which taper at the ankles. [Link]

In accordance with her religious beliefs and consistent with the school’s uniform requirements, Shabina wore a salwar kameez, or “shalwar kameez” as noted above. She did so for the first two years of her time at Denbigh. However, she later determined that the salwar kameez would not be appropriate for her to wear.

Her brother Shuweb Rahman says that “as Shabina became older she took an increasing interest in her religion” and through her interest in religion “discovered that the shalwar kameez was not an acceptable form of dress for Muslim women in public places.” [In 2002, Shabina] turned up at school wearing a long shapeless black gown known as a jilbab. [Link]

The school’s response? The assistant head master told Shabina to “go home and change.” She went home and never came back.

Shabina sued, claiming that her freedom to manifest her religion was violated. Yesterday, five Law Lords unanimously disagreed, holding that

there was no interference with the respondent’s [i.e., Shabina’s] right to manifest her belief in practice or observance. [Link]

there were three schools in the area at which the wearing of the jilbab was permitted…. There is, however, no evidence to show that there was any real difficulty in her attending one or other of these schools…. [Link]

Something smells down in Georgia and young Pranav Mahadevan is being forced to take a deep breath of the stink in. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports on an exclusive investigation which takes a look at the seedy underbelly of spelling bee competitions in this once great country:

Pranav Mahadevan, a serious speller since second grade, had one final shot at the state spelling bee, where a win would finally give him his ticket to the national stage in Washington.

In anticipation of the Georgia Independent Schools Association spelling bee in Macon last month, the Dunwoody eighth-grader pored over word lists and studied word roots in Greek, Latin and French. But he was eliminated when the judges said he spelled the wrong word. He spelled “ivy”; the judges were looking for “ivied.”

Pranav, a student at Our Lady of the Assumption School in north Atlanta, said he misunderstood the pronouncer. He spelled the word he thought he heard, a word he repeated for the judges before he started spelling. His mother, Kalpana Mahadevan, appealed her son’s dismissal immediately, as is her right under the bee rules. But she said the judges refused to replay the tape to see whether the pronouncer had clearly articulated the word. Instead, they ruled that Pranav was out and proceeded with the contest.

This is personal. First they screw us by misrepresenting Hindus in California textbooks and now they go after our kind in Georgia. Is it Pranav’s fault that Georgians can’t properly articulate the “-ed” at the end of their words? My personal advice would be to set up a commission to look into this. Scientists could come and quantify the acoustics of the competition room and speech therapists could assess the so-called “pronouncer.” Both could later testify as expert witnesses in front of the congressional committee which overseas these matters.

All hope is not lost however. After Hurricane Katrina, the city of Houston demonstrated its limitless generosity by taking in the vast majority of Katrina victims. On a recent trip to Houston, Pranav’s mom learned that the city was also known for taking in those abused by the Spelling Bee System and the incompetent federal and state officials who are responsible for its breakdown:

In Georgia, few students pursue spelling as diligently as Pranav, who has broadcasts of past National Spelling Bees on tape and can rattle off the winning words for the past several years.

His mother networked among parents in Texas, where the Indian-American community is very active in spelling bees. They advised her to move to Texas, saying that Georgia didn’t have a reputation of taking spelling competition seriously.

Georg…ia hates brown people.

Author Marina Budhos tackles the post-9/11 immigration crackdown in her new young adult novel Ask Me No Questions (thanks, Pooja and SAJA). She’s reading today in Manhattan at 6:30pm (note corrected time). Here’s the blurb:

For fourteen-year-old Nadira and eighteen-year-old Aisha, these are the words that define their lives. Nadira and her family are illegal aliens, fleeing to the Canadian border - running from the country they thought would one day be their home. For years, they have lived on expired visas in New York City, hoping they can realize their dream of becoming legal citizens of the United States. But after 9/11, everything changes. Suddenly, being Muslim means being dangerous. A suspected terrorist. And when Nadira’s father is arrested and detained at the border, she and her sister, Aisha are sent back to Queens, and told to carry on, as if everything is the same.

But of course nothing is the same. Nadira and Aisha live in fear they’ll have to return to a Bangladesh they hardly know. Aisha, once the academic star, falls apart. Now it’s up to Nadira to find a way out.

Budhos previously wrote The Professor of Light, House of Waiting, and Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers:

Jhumpa Lahiri and Marina Budhos

Marina Budhos was born in Queens, New York, the child of an Indo-Guyanese father and a Jewish-American mother who met in the 1950s when her father worked for the Indian Consulate in Manhattan…

She was a Fulbright Scholar in India, during which she wrote about the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India for The Nation. She has also covered international news for Ms… [Link]

… Marina Budhos’s second novel, The Professor of Light, [is] a vivid account of a young American girl’s troubled relationship with her brilliant but disturbed Guyanese-Indian father.

Born and raised in New York City, Budhos is the great grand-daughter of indentured laborers who left India for Guyana about a hundred years ago… [Link]

Movie candyman A. Lane has just revealed more info about Waris Singh Ahluwalia’s part in Spike Lee’s new film Inside Man. He reports in the New Yorker that Ahluwalia plays Vikram Walia, a Sikh hostage in a bank heist who’s disrespected by the cops coming to save him. It’s his second character named Vikram:

Magazine photo shoot: two hours Sauntering around armor room in a cape: priceless

The more it sags as a thriller, the more it jabs and jangles as a study of racial abrasion. A hostage is released, and an armed cop shouts, “He’s an Arab!” The hostage replies, “I’m a Sikh,” and you can hear the weariness at the edges of his fear…

“Grand Illusion” offered the ennobling suggestion that national divisions were delusory, and that our common humanity can throw bridges across any social gulf. To which Lee would reply, Nice idea. Go tell it to the guy who just had his turban pulled off by the cops. [Link]

… the ethnic vaudeville is pure Spike…. in-your-face all the time: Inside Man resounds with stray assertions of irate identity like… “What the fuck—give me my turban!” The latter demand, delivered by a Sikh bank employee to the cops who are questioning him, readily segues into a diatribe against post-9-11 profiling, the onrushing complaint coming to an abrupt bada-boom when [Denzel] Washington’s partner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) dryly observes, “I bet you can get a cab, though.” [Link]

There are a couple of references to institutional racism and post-9/11 angst… [Link]

Imagine that, a caper flick which discards the cliché of only casting white or black actors:

Through the main protagonists and bank hostages, Lee presents a multi-racial panoramic view of New York at present. [Link]

It may seem like a predictable cliche, especially to the director’s detractors, that he so intently underlines the ethnicity of even the most minor characters; ‘What the fuck — give me my turban!’much is made of the rainbow brigade that constitutes the hostage group: the white woman who talks loudly on her cell phone; the young Sikh hostage who, when released, strenuously complains of being mistaken for an Arab; the glam Albanian sexpot who knows how to play her cards, and the young black hostage whose ultraviolent “Kill Dat N*” computer game gives pause even to Russell. [Link]

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il has just made up a new reason why he’s building nukes instead of disarming: because of the recent India-U.S. nuclear energy deal.

‘I’m so lonely’

Last week, [North Korea] warned that it had the right to launch a pre-emptive strike… The spokesman also said it would be a “wise” step for the United States to cooperate on nuclear issues with North Korea in the same way it does with India… The accord was reached even though New Delhi has not signed the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. North Korea has withdrawn from the treaty and condemned the United States for giving India “preferential” treatment. [Link]

So he claims he’s going to continue the North Korea nuclear weapons program, begun over 13 years ago, because of a two-week-old treaty. Fabricating facts out of thin air to fit a pre-determined policy — where have I heard this before?

The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made. It went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq. [Link - former CIA senior analyst for the Middle East in Foreign Affairs]

And no, I’m not comparing Dubya with the dictator of an internationally isolated police state. As an American, Dubya would never condone torturing and locking up people without trial.

Related posts: How they learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb, The worst of ‘Times’

Isn’t that the GREATEST picture? Want to know the absolute best thing about it? It’s true.

Are you ready for this jelly?

The much-adored and revered “Yo Dad” might make a cameo at the first-ever chocolate city SMeetup.

Go ahead. Take a moment to digest. I know I needed one.

According to highly placed, unnamed sources, the parent whose words inspire collective swooning on any thread he comments on will be at Amma’s in Georgetown this Saturday. NOW what’s your excuse for not coming? Even the legendary (six-hours?!) San Francisco events and Manhattan meets didn’t have THIS sort of star power. Surely you’ll be in attendance now, right? :)

After all, this will be our Abhi’s first meetup. Mind blowing, right? The father of this Mutiny will finally link himself publicly to this scandalous site; this brazen and ultra-rare excursion from the innermost sanctum of the North Dakota bunker shall concomitantly jeopardize his future chances for political office AND mark him as an unsuitable boy. Do you really want to miss that?

In addition to those headliners and legends, steadfast mutineers Kenyandesi, Msichana, CinnamonRani, Chai and the awe-inspiring Chick Pea from Hotlanta—who is making the rest of you look lame with her devotion to the cause, i.e. her willingness to travel— will be attending as well, according to our last call for RSVPs.

And you? Should we add you to the list?

WHERE: Amma’s Vegetarian Kitchen, 3291 M St. NW, Washington, DC 20007, 202-625-6625

WHEN: Saturday, 5:30pm (which should enable a 6pm start)

WHY: My fotolog is needing snaps, yaar. ;)

According to Karsh Kale, the London born and New York raised producer/dj/musician, the title of his third studio release (and most recent album) entitled Broken English, was based on the concept of trying to

“create songs in English, but to give them a sentiment and a sense of universality, so it works in places where English is not their first language. But at the same time, you still understand the sentiment of the songs. That was the original idea of Broken English (link).”

I must admit, I was really looking forward to this third album. To this day Kale’s debut Realize continues to be one of my favorites, and I love its remixed incarnation Redesign. I was however slightly disappointed with Liberation, the follow-up to Realize. For me, Realize had set the bar so high that no follow-up could have topped it. Don’t get me wrong, Liberation was good, just not great. Perhaps it was Kale’s departure from the familiar drum and bass and dance vibe that I was used to, or maybe it was that I thought the cinematic feel of the album was a reach.

In any case, I approached Broken English anxiously, mainly because I had found many recent diasporic desi releases to be trite and mechanical. I was hoping Broken English would be different, and different it was. Wait, is that innovation and musicanship I hear? When I first started listening, I heard hints of Nitin Sawhney through the innovative and non-overtly desi touches in the production, vocals, and instrumentation. Yes the album has Bollywood and Bhangra, as well as the tablatronica that Kale is known for, but it also incorporates hip-hop and rock. All of which work surprisingly brilliant together. While overall, the album presents an eclectic and lush soundscape, Kale stayed true to his roots and kept a few tracks purely South Asian, including among others, the nicely paced “Drive,” and the beautiful duet “Some Things are O.K,” featuring vocals by Sabiha Khan and longtime Kale collaboratorVishal Vaid.

This album is clearly no East meets West hybrid, and there is no American curry or other Indian food adjectives available to describe the sound. It is what it is: purely American in every complex way that makes an American, an American. You get that sense immediately with the opening track, Manifest (click here for free official download): where MC Napoleon raps alongside Vaid’s vocal, while a dhol loop echoes in the background. This is followed by one of my favorite record’s on the album, “Dancing at Sunset,” featuring Todd Michaelsen’s English vocals alongside Carnatic strings and an eloquently placed tabla break and Hindi vocal.

The Minuteman Project (MMP) is a group of reportedly 6,500 volunteer citizens who are attempting to address and curb illegal immigration in the United States by patrolling the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders. The purpose of the group, in its own words, is:

to bring national awareness to the decades-long careless disregard of effective U.S. immigration law enforcement. It is a reminder to Americans that our nation was founded as a nation governed by the “rule of law,” not by the whims of mobs of ILLEGAL aliens who endlessly stream across U.S. borders….

Future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a harmonious “melting pot.”

The result: political, economic and social mayhem. [Link]

Not surprisingly, the MPP has generated a signficant amount of controversy: it has been accused of being racist, ineffective, illegitimate, and of having ties to Neo-Nazis. Last year, legal observers from the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Arizona monitored the activities of the MMP volunteers, before the MMP left Arizona in April 2005. One concerned onlooker had this to say about the MMP’s work:

“It’s going to encourage a lot of negative implications for brown-looking people, if you want to call it that, racial profiling….” [Link]

To be sure, citizens can be an integral part of a wider law enforcement initiative. For example, community policing — which involves collaborative efforts between the police and members of the general public, and which demands compassion from the police towards the communities they serve — has shown encouraging signs of success, particularly in areas with high concentrations of minorities, such as Miami. However, the MPP is not a part of an official border patrol program; it is a self-appointed entity that acts in isolation and with an unfortunate view of diversity and multiculturalism. Moreover, there are fears from human rights organizations as to how the MMP actually carries out its patrolling efforts - through directly confronting migrants, apprehending them, or worse.

For the past week the darling of the media has been Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia:

President Bush welcomed Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to the White House on Tuesday, calling Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state “a pioneer.”

In January, first lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attended the inauguration of the 67-year-old Harvard-educated former finance minister. She inherits a war-ruined nation of 3 million with an 80 percent unemployment rate, no running water and no electricity. Despite its diamond and timber wealth, Liberia is among the world’s poorest; ranked 206th in per capita income out of 208 countries on a 2004 World Bank list.

Neither leader publicly commented on U.S. aid to Liberia or Sirleaf’s request for Nigeria to hand over exiled former President Charles Taylor, who is wanted on war crimes charges. Taylor has been indicted by a U.N. tribunal on charges of committing crimes against humanity by aiding and directing a Sierra Leone rebel movement and trading guns and gems with insurgents infamous for chopping off the lips, ears and limbs of civilian victims. [Link]

The shadow of Charles Taylor will dominate Liberian politics for the forseeable future. Taylor is one of the main reasons why I have vowed never to purchase a worthless “rock” for anyone.

After the official end of the civil war in 1996, Taylor became Liberia’s president on August 2, 1997, following a landslide victory in July, in which he took 75% of the vote. The election was judged free and fair by observers, although Taylor’s victory has been partially attributed to the belief that he would resume the war if he lost, and therefore many people may have voted for him simply to preserve peace. For example, his campaign song included the words “he killed my ma, he killed my pa, I’ll vote for him…”

In June 2003, a United Nations justice tribunal issued a warrant for Taylor’s arrest, charging him with war crimes. The UN asserts that Taylor created and backed the RUF rebels in Sierra Leone, which is accused of a range of atrocities, including the use of child soldiers. The prosecutor also said Taylor’s administration had harbored members of Al-Qaeda sought in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania… [Link]

So that brings us to the negotiations which seek to extradite the scum bag from Nigeria. Many people are afraid that bringing him to justice will cause bloodshed by polarizing the fragile country once again. Some of the negotiations on Taylor’s behalf are being conducted by an American. He is an Indian American evangelical preacher to be precise: Kilari Anand Paul.

Desi women have now joined desi men in the business of assisted fertility. When you combine Indian medical prowess with lots of poor people you get pharmaceutical testing, organ sales, and now a thriving business in surrogate motherhood [Thanks to wgiia for alerting me to this story]. This sector is now worth roughly a half a billion dollars a year and growing rapidly.

Daksha, a shy Gujarati woman in her early 30s, wants a child - but not for herself. The baby is for the “Britishers”, the couple seated in the lobby of the Indian fertility clinic. It is the first time that the British Asian couple, Ajay and Saroj Shah, from Leicester, have met Daksha. The 31-year-old is “loaning” her womb to them for 150,000 rupees (£2,000) and is candid about needing the money. Her shop job pays only 2,000 rupees a month. [Link]

Daksha is getting paid six years of salary for this service, and the desi British couple involved have gotten away cheaply (why am I not surprised?). Another story gives a price almost twice as high for a Scandanavian couple:

Mehta is, in fact, renting her womb out to the couple for a cool Rs 4 lakh to Rs 5 lakh. [Link]

Like everything else in India, however, local prices are far cheaper than prices in the west:

… it costs £100-300 to advertise for a surrogate mother in India versus the £1,000 charged by a British daily. Not surprisingly, an advertisement for a surrogate mother has been appearing in Indian newspapers and magazines in a dozen cities once a week for a couple of months [Link]

[One] couple … will be spending nearly Rs 10 lakh on the entire process, far less than the Rs 26 lakh to Rs 35 lakh they would have had to fork out at an in vitro fertilisation (IVF) clinic in California, which they had considered earlier. [Link] … They opted for the Indian clinics to save 2.5m rupees (£31,000). [Link]

At about £3,000 in Britain, an IVF cycle costs five times what you might pay in India. In addition, in Britain, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has outlawed payments, but a surrogate can be reimbursed for a maximum of £10,000 to cover expenses; the payments often fall between £4,000 and £10,000. [Link]

In the US, a single IVF cycle is six to eight times more expensive than in India, where it comes for Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh — or half of what it costs in the UK. [I realize that these figures are inconsistent] The refinement of such techniques and their low cost is what is spawning the boom in surrogate motherhood. And it helps that the amount earned for bearing a child for somebody else can be as high as a middle-class office-goer’s salary for two years or so. [Link]

Apparently, THIS is why my sister’s friends are putting their lives on the line in Afghanistan:

An Afghan man is being tried in a court in the capital, Kabul, for converting from Islam to Christianity.

Abdul Rahman is charged with rejecting Islam and could face the death sentence under Sharia law unless he recants.

Rahman, who was carrying a bible last month when he was arrested and charged with dissing Islam, has a backstory which is perfect for a Christian martyr, replete with persecution from the most intimate levels:

He converted 16 years ago as an aid worker helping refugees in Pakistan. His estranged family denounced him in a custody dispute over his two children.

Four years after the Taleban was ousted, conservative clerics are still in control of Afghanistan’s judiciary, stymieing Hamid Karzai’s reform-minded government, which would obviously prefer a secular legal branch. Afghanistan’s Sharia-based constitution enables this mess, creating a clusterfuck where Karzai can’t intervene in this case of conservatives v. reformists.

Trial Judge Ansarullah Mawlazezadeh benevolently states:

“We will invite him again because the religion of Islam is one of tolerance. We will ask him if he has changed his mind. If so we will forgive him,”

How tolerant of them. Shame on such narrow-minded hypocrites. Shame on those whose narrow-minded hypocrisy defiles a religion which means “peace”.

It turns out that they don’t just hate Christians (whew! THAT’S a relief):

Several journalists have been prosecuted under blasphemy laws in post-Taleban Afghanistan.

The editor of a women’s rights magazine was convicted of insulting Islam and sentenced to death last year - but was later released after an apology and heavy international pressure.

I don’t want to be the president of Afghanistan right now. Constitutionally castrated, he can’t do a thing as Sharia-mad clerics rush to judge and potentially execute a man whose only crime was choosing a different (and still Abrahamic!) faith.

This NYT story about single women attempting artificial insemination explains what happens when a 38-year-old, blond, female advertising exec starts browsing sperm donor profiles. Yup, one of them turns out to be desi:

She loves dandy lions

As I sat across her desk, she pulled up the donors’ descriptions on her computer. One was Indian: “He’s got black straight hair,” she told me, “brown eyes, he’s six feet but he only weighs 150. Which is good. If I have a girl, she wants to be skinny, and if she can eat what she wants, that’s perfect. You don’t have to get in fights about food.” The Indian donor’s complexion was described as “medium/dark,” and he had proven fertility. He had a master’s degree in business. He was bilingual, Hindu, single and liked traveling and music. His family-health history looked good. [Link]

I can see their first meeting now. He comes out of the kitchen in a salwar kameez with a dupatta over his head, tea tray in hand, eyes downcast and shy. She ticks ‘wheatish complexion’ on her clipboard and says, ‘Beta, please walk around the room’ to make sure he’s not lame. She opens his mouth and checks his molars, hocks and withers.

Sure, everything looks good on paper now, but what happens 18 years down the road? They need to put out a public health warning:

This story shouldn’t surprise anyone though. With the conservative public morés of traditional desi culture, hundreds of millions of desi men happily spill surplus gametes outside the regular channels. But this chap was the only one enterprising enough to get paid for it.

Is he desi? Oh, indubitably.

Desi athletes have picked up a series of gold medals in the 2006 Commonwealth games in Melbourne. I know it’s not the Olympics, but the sight of a gold medal hanging around any brown neck is rare enough that it is worth remarking on. India is ranked third of all countries (after Australia and the UK England), with 12 gold medals, while Pakistan and Sri Lanka each have one. [By comparison, Australia, the host, has 42 gold medals and the UK England has 18]

Invoking every Goddess before serving sure slowed things down

In table-tennis, India’s women’s team won a closely fought match against Canada, winning 3-2. “I prayed to the Goddesses to please give me strength to perform well for myself and India,” India’s Mouma Das is quoted as saying by AFP news agency. “I felt in my heart they heard” [Link]

This isn’t even badminton fer cryin’ out loud, let alone “real” tennis. How much pride am I supposed to take in the fact that it took all the Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon to win a table tennis competition without any Chinese athletes! And air rifle and table tennis account for at least half of the Indian gold medals.

The most macho gold medal was won by the Pakistanis who set a new Commonwealth record in weightlifting:

Pakistan picked up its first gold medal of the Games with a win for Shuja-ud-din Malik in the men’s 85kg weightlifting event. Malik’s combined 343kg in the clean-and-jerk, including a new Commonwealth record of 193kg, placed him ahead of Cameroon’s Brice Batchaya. [Link]

I’ve got my fingers crossed, hoping that desi athletes can redeem themselves by doing well in some more strenuous sport, like Netball or Lawn Bowling. During the last Commonwealth Games, the Indians won 30 gold medals. Would it be too much to ask if half of India’s gold medals this time were in sports that desi mothers would disapprove of?

UPDATE: Wgiia, ms and Soooraj remind me that India’s first gold medal was earned by female weight lifter Kunjarani Devi and that two of India’s 12 medals are in women’s weightlifting.

A new breed of NYC subway card vending machines which can sniff trace amounts of explosives on customers’ hands is about to be tested in Baltimore.

K9 agent

Two companies have teamed up to develop a machine that can detect whether the straphanger who just touched the start button or screen has recently handled explosives. Alerts - including a digital image of the person at the machine and the type of substance detected - can be quickly transmitted to law enforcement officials, company officials said. The device can be programmed to lock turnstiles at the station… A pilot project to test its effectiveness in a mass transit system is expected to be launched in Baltimore in the coming weeks. [Link]

The companies involved may be going this way because there are fewer card vending machines than subway turnstiles, and there’s more space inside each one to cram in sniffers. But this method so indirect, it’s like looking for a lost quarter under a streetlight instead of where you actually dropped it.

First, a terrorist smart enough to build a bomb is probably smart enough to buy a subway card from any newsstand or convenience store. Second, trace sniffing seems like it could be easily circumvented by using gloves and changing clothes (pure conjecture, this is not my field). Third, there’s a risk of false alarms from people who work with explosives-like substances, such as gardeners who use fertilizer, and those who work with explosives as part of their jobs, such as the mole-men currently digging new water tunnels in NYC.

NYC’s bag check security theater seem to have faded away after the post-7/7 hysteria, but subway cities still need to scan for actual bombs, not indirect conjectures of WMD-related program activities. Entrances and turnstiles are the right places to put these scanners, not easily-bypassed vending machines. And profiling is just as useless — based on actual empirical evidence in NYC, we’d be targeting white male software developers and Latino ex-cops:

Since the News tab turned out so well, here’s a new Events tab for your pleasure (thanks, Abhi). Readings, plays, premieres, your own mini-meetups — feel free to post away.

Unlike the rest of the blog, events are sorted forward by time. That means upcoming events are shown first so you can see what’s happening in the next couple of days. Click the address to get a map to the event. Past events expire automatically.

The subscription feed will be up in the next few days.

…but if certain people had their way, she wouldn’t. Via the BBC:

The family of a young Muslim girl in India’s southern state of Kerala say they are being shunned by the local mosque committee (mahallu) because she is practising Indian classical dance.

VP Rubiya, 16, came first in Bharatnatyam, Kerala natanam and folk dance competitions at the recent Kerala School Festival.

She also won the dance competition at the Veeran Haji Memorial Higher Secondary School at Morayur in the Muslim-dominated district of Malappuram.

“That is NOT a Christian thing to do,” my normally-very-chill Mother snapped. When she noticed my perplexed expression, she tried to explain her reaction.

“It’s not just a dance, it is religious. It is very Hindu, and as an Orthodox girl you should understand why you can’t participate.”

No one in my family has studied it”, she concluded, as if that was the end of that.

“If she had won prizes in ‘oppana’ and ‘mappila pattu’ [traditional Muslim art forms], she would have been flooded with gifts by now. The mahallu leaders would never openly admit that it is her dance that makes them treat us as virtual outcasts,” says Mr Alavikutty.

The indomitable Rubiya has danced since age three; she has performed at over 50 temples, using the fees she earns to help support her family. Her dance gurus RLV Anand and Bharatanjali Sasi don’t charge her for her lessons or her costumes.

“I’m confident that she will bring us laurels. That’s all we need,” says Mr Anand, extolling the virtues of the rare find from a community that still fights shy of classical dances.

I’m not at all surprised by the following:

Rubiya is the darling of her teachers and friends at the Veeran Haji high school.

…when the girl drops wisdom like THIS:

“God is one. When I pay ritualistic obeisance through mudras [hand signs], I am imploring not just the Hindu gods but the supreme creator, which we call by different names,” she says.

Word.

It is amazing to me that five years after 9/11 the airlines STILL don’t have their acts together in preventing racial discrimination by their aircraft crews. The latest comes from the Bay Area:

A Muslim father and son from Hayward filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Transportation this week, accusing airline attendants of booting them off a flight because of their appearance.

Fazal Khan, 59, and his son, Mohammed Khan, 28, boarded a United Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Oakland on Jan. 31 wearing traditional South Asian tunics, white skullcaps and loose trousers. Both men also have long beards…

[Shirin Sinnar of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco] said the Khans do not know of anything, other than their attire, that could have agitated the female flight attendant, who apparently expressed concern to the terminal crew about their presence.

“When they got on the plane, she helped them with their bags. That was their only interaction,” Sinnar said.

Sinnar said the two men boarded the flight with no problems. They had been sitting on the plane for about an hour before they were ejected.

Mohammed Khan was sleeping and sometimes reading the Quran, she said, while the father was relaxing awake. They were heading back to Oakland International Airport from a trip visiting family members.

The plane eventually moved down the runway but returned to the terminal as airplane staff announced mechanical difficulties, Sinnar said.

An airline customer service representative walked onto the plane and asked the Khans to bring their carry-on handbags with them and return to the airport terminal, Sinnar said. [Link]

Next comes the most incomprehensible part. You would think that two people that aroused enough suspicion to be kicked off a flight would at least have their bags removed from cargo. Not so in this case. The Khans were placed on the next flight to San Francisco but their bags (minus carry-on) continued on to Oakland aboard the original aircraft:

After escorting them out, the representative was “sympathetic” but said they could not return because the flight attendant was not comfortable with them on board, Sinnar said…

“The strange thing is no one took the bags off the first flight,” Sinnar said. “If there was any thought they were a security risk, certainly their bags should have been removed…” [Link]

Straight-up racial discrimination. The father and son say they were humiliated and will be suing Utah-based SkyWest who were responsible for staff on the aircraft.

See related post: Fear of flying

A new Cartoon Network series, Minoriteam, aims to be a sendup of racism. But it’s not clear whether it’s mocking stereotypes or just profiting off them. I’m going to assume the humor just doesn’t come across well in print:

‘By chutney, you’re right!’

Created by Adam de la Peña, Todd James and Peter Girardi — all alumni of the ribald Comedy Central puppet series “Crank Yankers” — “Minoriteam” is a provocative animated show that sends up bigotry. It makes its debut tomorrow night on Cartoon Network’s late-night “Adult Swim” block of animated shows…

Non-Stop is the alter ego of Dave Raj, an Indian, former professional skateboarder turned convenience store clerk who is incapable of being killed by firearms. After having been shot 235 times during various attempted robberies, his skin is saturated with lead, which serves as a bulletproof armor of sorts; when necessary, his skateboard morphs into a flying carpet. [Link]

If you’re keeping score at home, we have one half-naked, turbaned Indian convenience store clerk on a flying carpet, one Chinese laundry owner with a thick accent, one Mexican gardener who can’t speak English, one angry, promiscuous black man and one avaricious Jew. How subversive.

The team’s leader, Dr. Wang, is an Asian, wheelchair-bound mathematical genius with a freakishly large brain. He speaks with a heavy Chinese accent and is in the laundry business…

Landon K. Dutton, a black man awkwardly teaching women’s studies at Male University, turns into Fasto, the world’s fastest man. His extreme rage propels him to travel at breakneck speeds. When not fighting crime he spends his time “studying” the opposite sex; during one episode, it takes him only seconds to satisfy a roomful of Thai prostitutes.

Richard Escartin, a Mexican oil baron, trades his tailored suits and silk ties for a giant sombrero and a leaf blower when he becomes El Jefe, Minoriteam’s hardest working member. El Jefe’s blower is no ordinary garden tool. It can suck and blow with deadly force and rip holes through time and space. His kryptonite? Tequila. “I think a lot of people can relate to that,” Mr. de la Peña said.

Neil Horvitz may be a wimpy mail clerk in his early 20’s, but his alter ego, Jewcano, is a muscle-bound 62-year-old who sports an XXXL yarmulke and has all the power of the Jewish faith and a raging volcano. Watch him shoot molten lava from his wrists (move over, Spider-Man)…

Surely someone will be uncomfortable watching a Jewish superhero get aroused while chasing a giant glowing nickel, they said. “But who exactly will it offend?” Mr. de la Peña asked. “I have no idea…” [Link]

This morning, I stumbled in to a rather important meeting nearly twitching from twin deficits in sleep and kcals. I furrowed my brow, willed myself to focus…and found myself talking about nanofiction, of all things. The man I was meeting with had googled me and he wanted to know what the deal was with “that 55 thing” he had seen on my blog. As I hastily prepared an answer, I mentally swore at myself that if I used the word “meme” more than once, I’d deny myself food for such lame blogginess. I am pleased to report [burp] that I did not suffer from starvation today.

Buzzwords aside, I was struck by the look on the man’s face when I told him about Hemingway’s famous piece of flash fiction, all six words of it. He was concomitantly fascinated and appreciative, as all good readers are. It was at that very moment that I thought of Jai and nearly drowned in 55-related guilt. ;)

Since we’ve done this and this, I figured that today would be an apposite day for quelque-chose similar. Oui? Oui. We will make others green with envy at all of our brilliant fun. As always, you are welcome to comPLETEly ignore my thematic suggestions and doowutchyalike. Just do it in the comments below, mmmkay? And remember, you might be hungover from too much guiness, but you can still string together 55 words, my out-of-practice leprechauns. ;) Seek sympathy for headaches, nausea, dehydration and lost pots of gold elsewhere— we’ve got fiction to write!

Mr. Everything Comes from India breaks down the origins of the Irish flag:

Dressing up in color and molesting people while tipsy:

This Holi week	She must be Asian Irish

The official plant is a widely-available magical weed:

Bhang	Shamrock

More specifically, the Irish are like the Punjabis. One is a farming culture where people are warm, like to drink and like to fight. Its men are famed both for toughness and for being mama’s boys. The other sits around singing farmer songs in an unintelligible accent. It used to host a religion-based separatist movement and is now a magnet for outsourcing. I even know of several Irish-Punjabi marriages. No, nothing like each other at all

Éireann go Brách, chak de phatte and belated happy Holi!

Update: Check out these Irish-Indian fusion tracks: ‘Punjab Paddy’ by Gaelicstorm and Butterflies by conFusion (thanks, Saheli and niki).

Update 2: Post was accidentally deleted, taking the comments down with it. Mea culpa, sorry!

Related post: Holi Day munchies

Ignore, ignore, the flick’s a bore. V for Vendetta, an otherwise preposterous, pompous movie, does play an interesting Hindi remix over the closing credits, ‘BKAB’ by Ethan Stoller. Listen here. Also check out a fellow Chicago musician, Arthi Meera of the luscious voice.

The track mashes up covers of ‘Churake Dil Mera’ from Main Khiladi Tu Anari and ‘Pardesi Jana Nahin’ from Raja Hindustani. It’s all set to a thrash metal beat straight out of a video game, or the video game called XXX which masqueraded as a movie. It reminds me of the Sanskrit track over the credits in Matrix 3, ‘Navras’ by Juno Reactor (thanks, WesternGhaat).

Adapting an earnest graphic novel requires a lighter touch than the Wachowski brothers can muster. Subtlety and allegory demand a fictional veneer. The movie assaults the abuses of Dubya, but it’s almost entirely literal: prisoners wear black hoods and orange jumpsuits, the Koran garners sympathy, there’s a Bill O’Reilly stand-in, the V is an upside-down anarchy symbol, the evil regime’s logo is St. George’s Cross in black. Its treatment of discrimination against gays and lesbians (but not transsexuals) is thoroughly and probably unintentionally camp.

The filmmakers talk down to the audience by dissolving from the present into identically-framed flashback and back again. It’s like those action shots repeated three times in Bollywood flicks, just in case you didn’t get it the first time. The dialogue is full of leaden, soapy howlers, and the audience was unforgiving. Some lines can only be pulled off in noir, not in a brightly-lit room by a Shakespearean fop in a pageboy wig and a geisha mask. A key plot twist is so ludicrous, it had the audience groaning. The action is minimal, V has no real super powers, Natalie Portman coasts on her looks. John Hurt goes way over the top as a raving, spittle-flecked dictator. Poor Hugo Weaving spends the entire film behind masks and prosthetics — scale plus ten for that one.

In the words of the film, these artists use badly-penned lies to show the truth. Like walking in on someone fisting his ham, that’s just awkward all around. It’s the W’s, those exhibitionists again.

Watch the trailer. Here’s the NYT review.

Update: Slate links (thanks, Michael).

How to dispose of a dead body is carefully prescribed by religion. Burial is popular in the U.S., but a new book called Body Brokers makes clear that unregulated burials shunt body parts into a ghoulish trade. In a morbid sense, it’s a triumph of capitalism:

Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who profit by buying and selling human remains. While the government has controls on organs and tissue meant for transplantation, these “body brokers” capitalize on the myriad other uses for dead bodies that receive no federal oversight whatsoever: commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; medical research studies and training courses; and U.S. Army land-mine explosion tests. A single corpse used for these purposes can generate up to $10,000. [Link]

The corpses — including those donated for medical research and those left unclaimed at morgues — “are cut up into parts, not unlike chickens, and distributed through a complex network of suppliers, brokers and buyers,” Cheney writes…

… she takes a tour of a factory where crushed human bone is turned into precision-tooled orthopedic tools… their loved ones are destined for, among other things, testing of anti-mine protective armor… she tells the grim story of how mishandled bodily tissue killed a young man who underwent a routine orthopedic operation using bone from a cadaver. The killer? Deadly bacteria from the bone’s donor, a young man who shot himself and went undiscovered for almost a day. [Link]

Many Hindus and Buddhists practice cremation due to hygiene and beliefs about detachment and reincarnation. However, Christian and Muslim theologians have long opposed the practice, Christians because of a belief in literal resurrection:

Many people thought cremation was at best irreligious and at worst barbaric. The strongest opponents came from the Catholic Church which banned cremation for its members in 1886, and did not finally remove the ban until the 1960s. [Link]

In an Instruction issued in 1926, the Holy Office [of the Vatican] referred to cremation as “a barbaric custom … a practice repugnant to the natural sense of reverence due to the dead.” [Link]

In my never ending quest to become known in irrelevant circles as the brown Tim Russert, I bring you news of the 2007 Louisiana governor’s race. It is never too early to start thinking about such things:

With the displacement of hundreds of thousands of New Orleans voters due to Katrina, primarily African-American Democrats, Republican candidates stand a better chance of statewide victory. Undoubtedly, a percentage of these voters will settle in other states or not bother to vote from distant locations in upcoming elections. Both U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu and Governor Blanco won their races with only 52% of the vote, their margin provided by strong African-American support in New Orleans. With Katrina creating a much smaller Crescent City, it will likely lead to a totally different dynamic in the next election, making victory for Democrats more difficult. [Link]

The scuttlebutt has it that Governor Blanco is D.O.A. The Democrats are desperately trying to find someone to run in her place. Former U.S. Senator John Breaux (D), very popular in his day and buddy-buddy with the Republicans, is the perfect choice. Unfortunately he is a rich Washington lobbyist now and it would appear that he has no incentive to give up the good life and inherit a whole state full of major problems for an insignificant salary. So why are Democrats so worried? Yep, you guessed it. You knew where this was headed:

Waiting in the wings to oppose her is Republican Congressman Bobby Jindal. Although Katrina has produced state demographics more favorable to the Republican Party, the low approval ratings for the Republican Congress and the Bush White House will not exactly help Jindal win the election. Most likely, it will be another hard fought and typical Louisiana campaign. At this point, it looks like Jindal will prevail, but billions of dollars in extra money; pay raises for her core constituency and 18 months of being able to show at least some progress are advantages for the incumbent right now. At this point, Blanco is signaling to everyone in the state that she will compete for re-election and compete aggressively. [Link]

He has performed admirably since Katrina and Rita, working hard for his state, traveling across Louisiana, and visiting with victims of the hurricanes. Jindal has been pushing a conservative agenda in Congress, but one that is decidedly pro-Louisiana. He has worked tirelessly for more recovery funding for the state and is sponsoring legislation to give Louisiana a larger share of offshore oil and gas revenues. He has not hesitated to criticize the Bush administration when warranted, most recently in the controversy over a United Arab Emirates owned company controlling port operations in cities like New Orleans. [Link]

Ironically some in the Republican party want Jindal to go after the Senate seat in Louisiana instead (the one currently occupied by Mary Landrieu). If Jindal has any (gasp) Presidential aspirations then I’d stick to running for governor.

Right now, 19 months from Election Day, it looks like Bobby Jindal is in the catbird seat. This amount of time is a lifetime in politics, so anything can happen, but Democrats like Odom realize their unfortunate predicament. In the last few years, Jindal has done a good job of building relationships across the state. He will use this expanded network to launch his campaign for governor. It is a job that he has wanted for many years and one that at this point has his name on it. [Link]

While I was in India last month, I made it a point to read the local papers and watch the local news broadcasts. The purpose of this was to get a sense of the issues and concerns that were on the minds of the people and the press. Bush’s impending visit, the H5N1 (bird) flu, globalization, and the negative impact of the “MTV Generation” on the youth were frequent topics in the news and editorial pages.

Of greater interest to me were the numerous stories of NRI’s attempting to improve their villages. For example:

For a long time non-resident Indians have been donating for causes associated with their native villages or hometowns for schools, dispensaries or roads. In what is a rare example of donation targeted specifically for carrying out the battle against AIDS, cancer and TB in Punjab, a New York-based NRI today told the Punjab Government that he would spend $1 million (Rs 4.5 crore) on the project…. Mr [Surinder Singh] Dhall said: “If I am satisfied, I will donate even more than $1 million. It was my wish to donate for a larger cause and not restrict myself to building roads or schools in my native village.” [Link]

After Amritsar, I stopped by the Guru Nanak Mission Hospital, where I met a family friend from America who has committed himself towards improving this hospital and expanding its current capabilities. Again, I encountered an NRI who was devoting his time and money to a charitable cause in India.

And, even on the flight back to America (of all places), I ran into a friend who had spent three months in India managing the India-branch of his technology company. His interest seemed purely business-oriented, but in a larger sense he is still investing in the country.

The experience in India left me thinking: as an Indian individual who was born and raised in the United States, what is my moral obligation to providing anything to India or resident Indians, whether it be financial support, investment capital, professional expertise, or simple seva, or selfless service.

No, I’m just kidding. There is not a new Law & Order show in the works. Unbeknownst to me, the U.K. actually has an entire unit of people, the Forced Marriage Unit, which reviews cases of human rights violations as pertaining to forced marriages:

The Forced Marriage Unit sees around 250 cases a year. “There used to be confusion between forced and arranged marriages,” explains a member of unit staff. “They were seen as being part of a certain culture. But that’s changing now. Forced marriage is not a religious or cultural issue - it is a global human rights abuse”. Forced marriage means just that - where a victim (one was 13 years old) is told they have to get married and they don’t want to.

Cases can be difficult, as the young person doesn’t usually want to see their parents get into trouble. “As well as providing guidance, if we know in advance that someone is about to be forced into marriage, we can work with partners organisations to find an appropriate way to support the victim. If the victim goes overseas, our consular staff will work with the local police to do what they properly can to help the victim. In extreme cases this can mean helping to bring them back to the UK if this is what the victim wants.”

The BBC is reporting that the FMU is unveiling a new campaign, complete with awareness posters like the one seen to the right:

The campaign by the government’s Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) is backed by actor and writer Meera Syal and former EastEnders star Ameet Chana.

More than 250 cases are reported to the FMU each year, most of which involve links to south Asian countries.

A decision by the government is also expected soon on whether to outlaw forced marriages.

The new drive will include poster and television campaigns and radio and press adverts…

It will highlight the difference between an arranged marriage and a forced marriage, which is one conducted without the full consent of both parties and under duress. [Link]

We’d be forever grateful to our U.K. readers if they give us the heads up on any television or radio ads they’ve seen that get posted to the internet. I wasn’t able to find other versions of the posters but I am sure they will pop up soon. Not to make light of this very serious and worthwhile effort but the funny thing is that the poster to the right is vague enough that it may send casual passerbys (who are also committment-phobes) into an anxiety attack about an impending non-forced marriage. I’m just saying.

TGN1412 is the current designation given to a trial drug that is being tested in the UK as a treatment for leukemia. The first human trial resulted in some horrific results earlier today. First the background though:

Another human trial gone horribly wrong

Two men were in critical condition Wednesday in a London hospital and four others were seriously ill after taking a new drug in a trial supervised by a Waltham, Mass.-based company.

British regulators ordered the immediate suspension of tests of the drug, developed to treat autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and leukemia.

“Two patients remain critical and four patients are serious but showing some signs of improvement,” Ganesh Suntharalingam, clinical director of intensive care at Northwick Park Hospital, said in a statement. “The drug, which is untested and therefore unused by doctors, has caused an inflammatory response which affects some organs of the body…” [Link]

Here is how things took a turn into science fiction territory and became plain scary for the volunteers:

The girlfriend of a man fighting for life after taking part in a pharmaceuticals trial has said the drugs he was given have left him looking “like the Elephant Man”.

“His chest is puffed out. He is already a big kind of guy but his face is out here, like Elephant Man, it’s completely puffed.

She added: “They haven’t got a cure. This is not leukaemia. This is a drug they have never tested on humans before so they don’t know what they are dealing with. It’s completely messed up their vital organs…” [Link]

A couple of the hospitalized volunteers appear to have been of South Asian origin.

For those of you into ethnic drum and bass, british-asian hip hop, or good live music in general, and if you are in New York this Friday night (3/17), I highly recommend attending the upcoming New York Sub Swara show featuring some of the top south asian musicians/producers around, including State of Bengal (best known for that Flight IC 408 track from Talvin Singh’s Anokha record), Navdeep of Mutiny fame, DK aka Bollygirl (Avaaz/Kollektiv), and DJs Bobby Friction and Nihal (BBC Radio 1), among others of course. Click on the image for more information, but rumor has it that pre-release copies of State of Bengal’s upcoming album, along with some of the most innovative in diasporic desi sounds will be available at the show.

Last night I saw an odd Indian tourism billboard in Times Square. It read, ‘Get to know yoga from its mother,’ and the visual style reminded me of old-skool ‘An Ideal Boy’ posters.

The blurb in an advertising publication says the ads aim for kitsch, but IMO they fall into the chasm between kitsch and cheese. The colors say ‘An Ideal Boy,’ the visual style is fun. But the elements don’t work together. The slogan is lame, its font evokes Dances With Wolves, and the tagline in ultra-serious Bodoni strip it of wit. Indian tourism needs to hire whoever’s penning the witty Citi ‘Live richly’ campaign. I hear Rushdie’s available.

Even the campaign description is off:

Prathap Suthan, national creative director, Grey Worldwide, explains why this campaign stands out: “The difference lies in the expression which, according to me, is very Indian. Where one normally uses photography for billboards, which is a Western expression, the style used to communicate in this ad is the kitsch look… Opting for the kitsch look is based on everyday observations from all over India. These images have been drawn from village folk art and common imagery seen across India, images that bring to mind the colours, uniqueness and diversity of India.” [Link]

Kitsch, like cool, shrivels in sunlight. Trying to explain it kills it. Reading about it in dorky ad pubs kills it. Nonchalant, off-radar irony is the point. Calling it ‘the kitsch look’ voids any street cred. It’s painful even to read. I’ve lost all my Williamsburg karma by writing this paragraph.

Chantal, book me for a fauxhawk. The three hundred dollar kind. Tell them I want highlights, I’m feeling verklempt.

“Anyway monay, can I call you right back? I was in the middle of reports…”

“Ma? Please, really quick, ‘cause I’m writing something?”

“Vat?”

“Does kundi mean “ass” or “anus”?

Sigh. A deep breath is inhaled.

“This is for your website? Kundi is chunthi. Koothi means anus.”

“Let me be painfully careful— kundi and chunthi are like…the butt cheeks?”

“Yes, they are what I would like to kick right now, absolutely.”

“So, like, you could use kundi in the following context: “get your kundi on the dancefloor?’”

Another sigh is sighed.

“YES.”

“I knew it!”

An engineer named Vanajah Siva Subramaniam is one of the four finalists (and only woman) vying to become Malaysia’s first astronaut:

The Right Stuff

An ethnic Indian woman was on Tuesday named among four candidates short listed to become Malaysia’s first astronaut and travel to the International Space Station next year.

S Vanajah Siva Subramaniam, 35, will travel along with three Malay men to the Russian Space Agency in Moscow soon to undergo medical and technical tests that will establish which of them will take part in the scientific expedition on board the International Space Station in 2007.

The three men are Malaysia Airlines pilot Mohammed Faiz Kamaluddin, 34; army dentist Faiz Khaleed, 26; and Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, a 34-year-old hospital medical officer.

The four were chosen from more than 11,000 candidates who had submitted their applications in a process that started in 2003.

Vanajah is an engineer by profession. She was the only woman to be short-listed. All the three men are from the dominant Malay community, while Vanajah belongs to the ethnic Indian community, which comprises 8 per cent of Malaysia’s 26-million-strong population. [Link]

Her selection of course is dependent upon whether or not Malaysians think she is too sexy for the job of astronaut (I thought astronauts were REQUIRED to be sexy) . The astronaut who makes the final cut is scheduled to spend an expedition aboard the ISS sometime in 2007 (although I will bet money that the mission will be delayed at least a year).

Vanajah has previously said she hopes to inspire other Malaysian women to participate in science-related projects, saying her achievement proved that women could compete alongside men in rigorous trials.

The finalists have endured a battery of physical and psychological examinations, and officials said the remaining four were chosen on the basis of physical fitness, personality and preparedness, including family support. [Link]

I also found an article that describes some of those psychological tests that the Malaysian astronaut candidates were put through:

After extended periods of physical and mental stress, including sleep deprivation, being roused from a nice warm bed at 3am for a run followed by a swim, it becomes virtually impossible for anyone to continue pretending to be Mr Nice Guy.

Candidates were made to spend hours in pitch-dark jungle conditions to gauge whether they could endure long periods of isolation and sensory deprivation.

“It can be frightening if one is not used to the jungle but the candidates were never in any real danger ? what they did not know was that there were commandos assigned to watch over them at all times,” reveals Dr Teoh.

The latest New Yorker reports that Jawaharlal Nehru did an interview for Playboy’s October 1963 issue. Oh yes, we read it only for the articles. Will anyone cop to having a copy, or you gonna make me drag my culo down to the N.Y. Public Library? ‘Cause you know I will.

… Playboy’s fiction was far less important than its interviews, inaugurated in 1962. Among the subjects were Miles Davis, Peter Sellers, Bertrand Russell, Malcolm X, Billy Wilder, Richard Burton, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jimmy Hoffa, Albert Schweitzer, Nabokov, Jean Genet, Ingmar Bergman, Dick Gregory, Henry Miller, Cassius Clay, and George Wallace, and that’s just for the first three years. The questioning was long (seven to ten hours) and confrontational. Presumably for that reason—and maybe, too, because this was a skin magazine and what the hell—the subjects often said what they did not say elsewhere. [Link]

The cover model uses Nehru as a fig leaf of civility (NSFW):

Shortly after this interview ran, the Nehru ‘jacket’ became popular in America. I think you see where I’m going with this. Embarrassed, the Indian government quickly backpedaled:

… after the rest of the magazine had gone to press, we received word from the Indian Embassy in Washington that our interview with PM Nehru was not, in fact, the result of an exclusive, personal conversation with the head of the Indian state, but simply a gathering together of public pronouncements made by the Prime Minister in various speeches, statements, etc., over the past several years. The Nehru material was submitted to us by a well-regarded journalist-publisher who has previously conducted numerous similar interviews with famous personages all over the world: it was sold as an actual interview, recorded on tape, and the covering letters that so described the material also included photographs of the Prime Minister and journalist together… [Link]

Rajiv Gandhi also did an interview for Penthouse’s Jan. 9, 1987 issue (thanks, Karthik). And Kal Penn did a famously raunchy, somewhat tongue-in-cheek Playboy interview (NSFW):

What’s the most number of women you’ve slept with in a day?

Two, when I had the threesomes. But, ask me again three months after Harold & Kumar comes out. [Link - NSFW]

It’s pretty common for bigots to complain that outsiders are intent upon luring, seducing and despoiling their women. The defense of the motherland is intimately linked to the defense of mothers, and women in general, who have to be protected from the depredations of the evil other. It’s also common for nativists to complain that there are too many immigrants, and that those who arrive under legal cover often stay to do something else. However, it’s rare to complain that illegal immigrants pose a national danger because they’re just too good looking.

Warning: Bangladeshis will not be allowed into Malaysia if they look too much like this man!

Until now.

Malaysia is being swamped by thousands of illegal Bangladeshi workers who are gaining entrance on the pretext of being students, according to reports… Home affairs minister Radzi Sheikh Ahmad said the men end up doing menial jobs in response to a labour shortage. [Link]

Malaysia has a manpower shortage, and Bangladeshi men are arriving in Malaysia to fill the gap, to give Malaysia what it needs. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in this - it’s completely natural. Why should the minister object, then?

Home Affairs Minister Radzi Sheikh Ahmad said Bangladesh workers were still spotted on construction sites and in restaurants despite a ban on their employment two years ago over concerns they were causing “social problems”. “They have blue eyes and look like Hindi film actors and they create social problems here,” Radzi was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times of the reason for the ban…. Hindi films are popular amongst Malaysian women, as are handsome male Bollywood film stars. [Link]

Ahhh … that explains it. Bangladeshis are too sexy for their jobs (too sexy for their jobs, so sexy, they’re fobs). Can you just imagine the Malaysian ambassador asking the Bangladeshi PM to make sure that only ugly “students” go to Malaysia? [Give us your tired your poor, your ugly masses yearning to be free, the unattractive refuse of your too too sexy shore … ] And what does it mean that no such restriction is imposed upon Indians?

I’m sure that today, all over Dhaka, Bangladeshi college students are walking around, catching reflections of their butts in shop windows, and comparing each other to movie stars. “Dude! You so look like SRK! I’m not kidding man, you really do! You’ve got the same blue eyes as he has!”

[Thanks also to technophobicgeek who blogged this story on the News tab]

Stories about marriage in which South Asian women are treated like property, used as a means to obtain money, married off at the tender age of twelve, or attacked by their in-laws, understandably generate certain feelings, including shock, anger, disbelief, and sadness. Another expected reaction might be to think that these incidents occur on the fringes of a society: in an “old school” world that should be increasingly marginalized and whose degrading and stereotypical practices need to be exposed as such.

Categorizing these stories in this way not only stigmatizes certain vestiges of the “old school,” but also places or elevates the critic into a different world, a “modern,” “civilized,” or “Western,” one in which specific qualities — such as individual choice and gender equity — are at a premium. But, while disassociating one’s self from the old school has its psychological benefits, it would be a mistake to think that the women born and raised in the West are free of humiliation in the marriage or courtship process.

Recently, I have been reading a blog called British Born Confused Desi (BBCD). The author describes herself as:

a Londoner who has her foundations firmly rooted in her Pakistani heritage. I face a constant state of confusion as I battle between trying to be a good Pakistani girl and a modern British woman.

My folks have a family coming over to see me tomorrow, I hate doing things the traditional way. It really is a meat market situation and for some reason the “boy side” always seem to think that its their meat to buy. [Link]

Today after a very long time I was made to feel like a piece of meat…. . We got on pretty well for a first meeting.. His mother on the other hand spent two hours staring at me making me feel so uncomfortable, I dont think she liked me at all, Im quiet sure that i was too “modern” for her. His father didnt smile at me even once, i think both the parents have been on a course as too how to intimidate a person…. Anyway as per usual in our silly community system of arrange marriages, lets just wait and see what “they” say. At least with last weekends bunch I wasn’t interested in him at all. [Link]

It’s time once again for the annual Best of the Best competition. It will be held on April 15th in New York City:

Michigan represents at last year’s BOB

The 2nd Annual Best of the Best Indian Dance competition with participants coming from all across the nation will be held on April 15th, 2006! The show consists of three types of Indian Dance: Bhangra, Raas-Garba and Fusion/Bollywood, where competing teams are invited after placing first at a previous competition. The landscape of Indian dance competitions is filled with a variety of shows, each highlighting a different category of Indian dance. Best of the Best is unique in that it is the first large-scale non-profit competition to bridge the gap among these different dance styles and crown one winner among the top teams. The second annual Best of the Best competition will provide an entirely new and memorable experience for the audience and competitors alike. The show consists of three categories: Bhangra, Raas-Garba and Fusion/Bollywood, where competing teams are invited after placing first at a previous competition. A total of four prizes will be awarded among the nine competing teams: a cash prize to the winning team from each category as well as an overall Best Performance prize to the team that truly is the Best of the Best. In addition to the competing teams, the show will feature internationally recognized artists.

If you have never seen Indian dance before, then Best of the Best promises to provide a birds eye view of the wide-spread landscape of Indian dance. For more information and updates please visit www.bobnyc.com, or e-mail us at info@bobnyc.com.

Performance Schedule:
Saturday, Apr 15, 2006 at 7:30 PM… [Link]

The BOB website features some great pictures from the past show as well as more detailed event info. As usual the NYC kids get the fun events in their backyard.

See previous post: Portuguesa flips the ‘Bird’

The International Herald Tribune has a fascinating look at the headaches/near-heart-attacks that the Secret Service endured in securing Bush’s visit to Pakistan. It also includes a particularly insightful comparison to Bill Clinton’s 2000 trip. This may go a ways in providing an answer to a post on The Acorn a few days ago that posited some notions that I found a bit far-fetched.

How did it happen that the president spent a night in Pakistan, the assumed haven of Osama bin Laden and one of the one most dangerous countries in the world?

The short answer is that Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, insisted. The long answer is a tale about the nightmare scenarios of the Secret Service and the calculated risks of presidential travel…

The fuzziness [of the travel plans to Pakistan] was to keep terrorists guessing about the timing of motorcades and the arrival of Air Force One, basic precautions passed down from a cloak-and-dagger trip that President Bill Clinton made to Pakistan in 2000 that had the Secret Service in an uproar. Six years later, accounts of the trip from former Clinton administration officials are far more harrowing than was known at the time.

“In the preparations for the 2000 visit, the service dug its heels in, repeatedly confronting the top NSC officials with horror scenarios,” Benjamin and Simon write. “There was danger to Air Force One from ground fire. No one trusted the Pakistani military to keep travel routes in the country secret or secure. The service said it could not perform its mission: It could not protect the president. In a meeting with Clinton, Larry Cockell, the head of the presidential detail, told him so.”

Clinton overruled the Secret Service, although he decided that his daughter, Chelsea, who was to accompany him to India on the same trip, should not make the stop in Pakistan. Clinton ended up slipping into Islamabad for less than six hours on a small military jet owned by the CIA while an Air Force One decoy flew in to draw a possible attack. It was a dramatic and, for Musharraf, embarrassing difference to the five previous days that Clinton had spent out in the relatively open in India. [Link]

Very cool. I would love a job planning out stuff like this. Especially after watching 24 last week. I like seeing gutsy calls where the President overrules his bodyguards at his own peril.

There still aren’t that many desis on the field in U.S. sports. However, that hasn’t stopped us from being an important part of the game. We’ve mentioned young Paraag Marathe in the 49ers front office. Over the weekend Sunil Gulati was elected the head of U.S. Soccer:

U.S. Soccer’s membership elected long-time U.S. Soccer executive Sunil Gulati as president of the U.S. Soccer Federation by unanimous consent on Saturday at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. Gulati succeeds Dr. S. Robert Contiguglia, stepping down after two successful four-year terms. Gulati, who ran unopposed in the election, has served as U.S. Soccer’s vice president since 2000.

“I am honored to serve our membership in this capacity and look forward to helping to continue to guide our sport through the most prosperous period in our history,” said Gulati. “Across the past decade, a platform for this sport has been built that did not previously exist, and we now have an opportunity in the coming years to achieve more for soccer in the United States than anyone could have ever envisioned 15 or 10 or even five years ago.” [Link]

Gulati has spent many years in the trenches, including in the front office of the New England Revolution. It is no fluke that he was elected to this position.

Gulati, a native of Allahabad, India, has played a major role in the development of U.S. Soccer since the early 1980’s and is currently U.S. Soccer’s Executive Vice President. Previously, amongst a number of roles, Gulati has served as Managing Director of National Teams, Chairman of the International Games Committee, Chairman of the Technical Committee and Managing Director of U.S. Soccer’s Project 2010. [Link]

In addition to his soccer job, Gulati is also a professor in the Economics Department at Columbia University. I happened upon a website where students get to rate their professors. This is what they have to say about Gulati:

# Ratings: 5
Average Easiness: 1.8
Average Helpfulness: 4.2
Average Clarity: 4.6
Hotness Total: 0
Overall Quality: 4.4

Also check out our frequent commenter Kush Tandon’s picture. These two must be long lost brothers :)

The British rag The Economist once again criticizes the U.S.-India nuke deal for breaking the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, claiming there’s some kind of comparison with the pariah government of Iran:

In striking his deal with India, allowing it to import nuclear fuel and technology despite its weapons-building, Mr Bush has not for the first time seemed readier to favour a friend than to stick to a principle… His gamble is a dangerous one… Rule-bending for India is bound to encourage some other countries to rethink their nuclear options too. [Link]

Meanwhile, here’s how the same country is treating the NPT and the Iran argument in a report out the same week (thanks, RC):

Rabinder Singh

Over the past few years the [UK] government has quietly been pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of extra funding… in pursuit of a replacement warhead for the Trident ballistic missile system…. the data produced by the test were part of a much wider, secret research programme to build a new nuclear weapon that some experts say will breach the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)…

… the law firm for whom Cherie Blair works, has drawn up a legal opinion… that any replacement of Trident would constitute “a material breach” of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The opinion has been prepared by… a professor of international law at the London School of Economics, and Rabinder Singh QC, a barrister who challenged the legality of the Iraq war…

Under the NPT, which came into force in 1970, Britain is committed to prevent proliferation and to “pursue” disarmament… “Replacing [Trident missiles] wrecks any standing we have when we preach non-proliferation to countries like Iran…” The reality, as one US official put it, is that whatever the public political niceties, “Britain is focused on a successor to the Trident warhead”… [Link]

‘In striking his deal with the UK, allowing it to import nuclear missiles despite its weapons-building, Mr. Bush is taking a dangerous gamble. Rule-bending for the UK is bound to encourage Iran to rethink its nuclear options too.’ Innit, gander?

There is no real equivalence between the UK and Iran, nor between India and Iran, only a cartel negotiation. It’s strictly business.

Related post: The worst of ‘Times’

Red rain is coming down…
Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me…

— Peter Gabriel, ‘Red Rain’

In 2001, Kerala residents heard a sonic boom in the sky followed by two months of mysterious red rain. A physicist in Kerala took samples of the downpour and found what looked like cells without DNA. He believes that the material came from a meteor which exploded while aloft and speculates that the specimens were aliens hitching a panspermic ride. He’s pretty sure they aren’t red earth in pouring rain (thanks, masale.wallah):

On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people’s clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.

Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. ‘If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.’ Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001…

Dr. Godfrey Louis has just released these magnified images of the cells in a new paper in Astrophysics and Space Science (via Digg).

This NYT essay is a 5fer: mangoes, mehndi, curries, spices and cooking all in one piece (thanks, WGIIA). Brilliant marketing, Ms. Jaffrey! It’s not only King of Fruit, it’s Queen of Clichés and Hermaphrodite Bastard Child of Book Marketing.

mangomehndimayhem — sorry, sari

This essay itself is interesting, not really exotica — it’s about the fruit literal, not a metaphor:

The aim in India had always been to get sweet, melt-in-the-mouth, juicy mangoes with as little stringy fiber as possible… When these same mangoes entered Florida in the 19th century, they were mainly dismissed as “yard” mangoes. Too soft for shipping, they were considered lacking in commercial qualities. So all the fiber that had been bred out of them over thousands of years was bred right back, giving America the hard, pale rocks we see in stores today…

What America will be getting is the King of Fruit, Indian masterpieces that are burnished like jewels, oozing sweet, complex flavors acquired after two millenniums of painstaking grafting… One generous tree in Chandigarh bore about 30,000 pounds of mangoes every year for 150 years until it was hit by lightning…

A customs inspector, possibly noting my shifty eyes, asked me quite directly, “Are you carrying any mangoes?” … The mangoes were confiscated. This would have been bearable had I not been able to peep through a slight crack in the customs office door…

The officers were cutting up the mangoes and eating them. That hurt. [Link]

No, friends, desis, countrymen, lend me your ears for the text ad at the end. This PR placement shills for a mango-spice-curry memoir by everyone’s favorite actor auntie, mother of Sakina:

Madhur Jaffrey is… the author of “From Curries to Kebabs: Recipes from the Indian Spice Trail” and the forthcoming memoir, “Climbing the Mango Trees.” [Link]

Related posts: Mmmmmmmangoes!, Anatomy of a genre, M-m-me so hungry, Buzzword bingo, Sick of spices, Indian enough, Sailing the Seas of Cheese

“In the beginning of time, the skies were filled with flying elephants. Too heavy for their wings, they sometimes crashed through the trees and frightened other animals.

All the flying grey elephants migrated to the source of the Ganges. They agreed to renounce their wings and settle on the earth.When they molted, millions of wings fell to the earth, the snow covered them, and the Himalayas were born….”

I went to an amazing exhibit of sepia photographs earlier today at a “nomadic museum,” four stories high and made of cargo containers, on the Santa Monica pier. The exhibit was titled “Ashes and Snow,” and will be in Los Angeles through May:

Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow is an ongoing project that weaves together photographic works, three 35mm films, art installations and a novel in letters. With profound patience and an unswerving commitment to the expressive and artistic nature of animals, he has captured extraordinary, unscripted interactions between humans and animals.

His 21st-century bestiary includes more than 40 totemic species from around the world. Since he began creating his singular work of Ashes and Snow, Colbert had mounted more than 30 expeditions to locations such as India, Egypt, Burma, Tonga, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Kenya, Antarctica, the Azores and Borneo…

According to the latest Forbes ranking, the global center of desi wealth is Bombay, not Silicon Valley (thanks, WGIIA). India is the only South Asian country with billionaire private citizens (though a Sri Lankan Tamil émigré to Malaysia made the list), and Bombay has the most.

Vinod Khosla fell below the cutoff, as did most desi American techies except Ram Shriram, an angel investor in Google who is now apparently the wealthiest desi in the U.S. So with India’s recent economic growth, Indians are making more money by staying home than emigrating, quite a reversal, even though most who emigrated were not born into ultra-wealthy families. And these figures are in dollars, not even adjusted for purchasing power in the desh.

I suspect the stats are off though. If you were to treat national wealth as personal wealth, as several South Asian ruling families do, I bet the stats would change.

Where the wild things are

The U.S. is still far and away the best place to generate wealth, and New York City alone has more billionaires than any country except Germany:

While New York has the highest number of resident billionaires with 40, Moscow is second with 25, and London comes third with 23. [Link]

Indian billionaires have surpassed Japan’s in terms of total wealth:

A worldwide economic boom has yielded a record number of dollar billionaires in the past year, according to Forbes. Their number rose by 15% to 793 with India taking the lead in Asia… India’s 23 billionaires have a combined net worth of $99bn, surpassing former Asian leader Japan’s 27 billionaires with their total worth of $67bn. [Link]

India, whose BSE SENSEX market was up 54% in the past 12 months, is home to 10 new billionaires, more than any other country besides the U.S. Notable newcomers include Tulsi Tanti, a former textile trader whose alternative energy company owns Asia’s largest windfarm; Vijay Mallya, the liquor tycoon behind Kingfisher beer; Kushal Pal Singh, India’s biggest real estate developer; and Anurag Dikshit (pronounced “dix-sit”), another online gaming mogul, who made his fortune when he and two Americans took their PartyGaming poker company public in London last June. [Link]

DePaul graduate student Hemant Mehta had an idea. Instead of selling his soul to the devil (who always ends up screwing you), why not offer it up on Ebay to see how much people would pay to “save” it? It isn’t THAT crazy. I bet lots of people want to know how much their soul is worth. I sure do. The Wall Street Journal had and article the rocketed Mehta to fame a couple of days ago. Unfortunately a subscription is required to access the article. Luckily, Arzan has it pasted in his blog:

A few weeks ago, Hemant Mehta posted an unusual item for sale on eBay: a chance to save his soul.

The DePaul University graduate student promised the winner that for each $10 of the final bid, he would attend an hour of church services. The 23-year-old Mr. Mehta is an atheist, but he says he suspected he had been missing out on something.

“Perhaps being around a group of people who will show me ‘the way’ could do what no one else has done before,” Mr. Mehta wrote in his eBay sales pitch. “This is possibly the best chance anyone has of changing me.”

Evangelists bid, eager to save a sinner. Atheists bid, hoping to keep Mr. Mehta in their fold. When the auction stopped on Feb. 3 after 41 bids, the buyer was Jim Henderson, a former evangelical minister from Seattle, whose $504 bid prevailed.

Mr. Henderson wasn’t looking for a convert. He wanted Mr. Mehta to embark with him on an eccentric experiment in spiritual bridge-building… Days after the auction, Mr. Henderson flew to Chicago to see Mr. Mehta, who is studying to be a math teacher. The two met in a bar, where they sealed a deal a little different from the one the student had proffered. Instead of the 50 hours of church attendance that he was entitled to for his $504, Mr. Henderson asked that Mr. Mehta attend 10 to 15 services of Mr. Henderson’s choosing and then write about it.

Mr. Mehta also agreed to provide running commentary on the church services on the off-the-map site and take questions — bluntly sharing a nonbeliever’s outlook… [Link]

Hmmm. What is this “off-the-map site” that the article mentions? Could it be…yep, you guessed it. Mehta is a blogger:

I told my mom about the WSJ article. She was thrilled:

Me: Mom, there’s an article about the auction on the front page of the Wall Street Journal!

Mom: Go back to med school. [Link]

Rarely does an article or blog post occupy my thoughts for very long, but Vinod’s exceptional entry regarding an anti-“Islamist” manifesto is such an exception. The manifesto, you will recall, featured several prominent signatories, including Salman Rushdie, and argued in principle that the struggle against Islamism will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field.

When Sajit and I wrote for The Satya Circle, I asked in an essay, “is the war on terror more than a battle between arms and men, but between mentalities and worldviews as well?”

[T]he fact remains there is a large and growing disparity between the American worldview and that of other nations and cultures…. The disparity in understanding between America and other nations and cultures might serve as America’s biggest foe, not any military regime or any set of terrorist groups…. [T]he American worldview must expand in order to understand, yet by no means accept, the ideology and reasoning of the Taliban and others sharing its hatred, even if what the Taliban practices and preaches is beyond any reasonable sense of morality…. Destroying Al Qaeda and punishing those who sponsor, harbor, or otherwise encourage terrorism is not sufficient and cannot make the country truly safer or without real threat…. Unless and until America engages in such serious introspection and in the enterprise of comprehending the subjective worldview of the Islamic fundamentalists and others, America cannot take real long-term, proactive steps towards preventing another attack. [Link]

Now, this was written before the Iraq war. Since then, we have engaged in said war, arguably tortured, humiliated, and denied due process to Muslim detainees — reports of which have had the effect of further aggravating Iraqis and others, and contributing to the will that legitimizes and effectuates acts of terrorism.

Indeed, President Bush himself said yesterday:

[W]e cannot let the fact that America has not been attacked since September the 11th lull us into the illusion that the terrorist threat has disappeared. We still face dangerous enemies. The terrorists haven’t lost the will or the ability to kill innocent folks. [Link]

This extant will has led some to argue that the United States is actually losing the war on terror: killing suspected or prospective terrorists is insufficient and counterproductive, it is said, if doing so further inflames terrorist groups and their supporters. Certain U.S. policy is, in other words, a recruitment device. And it would be a mistake to assume that only fundamentalists or the impoverished are signing up; those interested in harming the United States for its actions include the educated and advantaged (see, e.g., “UNC Attack Suspect Wanted to Punish Gov’t”).

The interesting question is not whether the arms/men vs. will framework is an advantageous one, but how the concept of “winning the war of ideas” can be implemented into tangible policy.

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Related posts: Really Stuck on Shiva

SM tipster Veeral informs us that 29-year-old Californian Mehul M. Thakker is running for state Treasurer as a Green Party candidate. From his website:

Ummm. Is it just me or does Thakker look like he is auditioning for The Apprentice?

Mehul M. Thakker is an Investment Advisor in Oakland, CA with a focus on Socially Responsible Investment and Community Development. He is passionate about securing Economic Justice for low-income and minority groups in the U.S., and strives to educate on how to use the power of investment to create positive social change locally and globally.

His priorities as California State Treasurer would include reforming the State’s Investment Policy to create Economic Justice for low-income and minority groups, and implementing Renewable Energy Revenue projects to fund public schools and better teacher pay. In addition, he believes these reforms can help clean up California’s environment, create high-paying jobs, fix the State’s fiscal crisis, fight corporate corruption, and advance social justice and equal opportunity.

Mehul has served as Treasurer of NetIP-SFBA (Network of Indian Professionals) and is active in the movement for shareholder rights, and corporate social & environmental responsibility. He is also a member of the CA League of Conservation Voters, The Sierra Club, and The Gujarati Cultural Association of the SF Bay Area….

A first generation, South Asian American, Mehul was born and raised in Odessa, Texas and holds a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Texas at Dallas. His parents Mahendra and Vasant Thakker immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1969. Mehul has one sister, Shilpa Chaparala, and brother-in law, Amar Chaparala. He enjoys many hobbies, including travel, sports, camping, reading, and volunteering. [Link]

Wait. If he was born and raised here that would make him second generation, not first. I got to say that I really like his stance on the issues.

A new story in Nature reiterates that an Indian-American nuclear scientist’s claims of tabletop fusion are suspect (thanks, Saheli):

Dr. Rusi Taleyarkhan

Several Purdue researchers said Rusi Taleyarkhan, a Purdue professor of nuclear engineering, has stymied their attempts to verify or refute aspects of his controversial “bubble fusion” experiments since late 2003, when he joined Purdue’s faculty. In an article published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, they said their confidence in his work at Purdue and previously at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has been seriously shaken…

Seth Putterman, a professor of physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who received a $350,000 grant from the Defense Department to try to reproduce Taleyarkhan’s findings, said he has been unable to do so. [Link]

In February 2005, the BBC commissioned a collaboration between Seth Putterman and Ken Suslick (two leading sonoluminescence researchers) to reproduce Taleyarkhan’s work. Using similar acoustic parameters, deuterated acetone, similar bubble nucleation, and a much more sophisticated neutron detection device, the researchers could find no evidence of a fusion reaction. This work was reviewed by a team of four scientists, including an expert in sonoluminescence and an expert in neutron detection, who also concluded that no evidence of fusion could be observed. [Link]

Taleyarkhan’s paper had skeptics from the beginning — this excerpt is from 2002:

However, many scientists remain sceptical of the results reported by Rusi Taleyarkhan and his colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, including other researchers at ORNL who tried and failed to repeat the experiments.

The second ORNL team say they used a more sophisticated detection system. But team member Mike Saltmarsh says: “Our experiment saw no evidence for nuclear fusion. This does not prove that no nuclear fusion is going on - it’s virtually impossible to prove a negative - but it does show that if it exists, it is at a very low level…” [Link]

The French turban ban - it’s not just for school children any more. [Thanks to Greg and Al Mujahid]

Chirac: You can’t drive in my country. But you should take our toxic waste, and buy our goods. And keep that Mittal guy away from us! We’re civilized and you’re the natives, remember? Manmohan Singh: [Must not slap guest across the face. Must not administer thapad with my left hand …]

France’s highest administrative body ruled Monday that Sikhs must remove their turbans for driver’s license photos, calling it a question of public security and not a restriction on freedom of religion. [Link]

This, of course, is unequivocally full of steaming hooey. Firstly, it clearly is an abrogation of religious freedom for Sikhs. Secondly, it doesn’t even make sense! Unless they’re planning on banning driving while turbanned, this is going to make it harder for the police to compare drivers license photos with the individuals driving.

This ruling is a reversal of an earlier ruling that sided with the Sikh plaintiff on a technicality, and means that any future appeals will have to be conducted at a pan-European level:

The Council of State’s ruling reversed its own decision in December in favor of Shingara Mann Singh, a French citizen who refused to take off his turban for a license photo in 2004… Singh’s lawyer, Patrice Spinosi, has said they could take the case to other tribunals, such as the European Court of Human Rights. [Link]

None of you can drive in my country either! Off with all of your turbans!

Then again, this entire trip was about jointly selling French goods and French merde, so I shouldn’t be surprised. France is hoping to supply India with nuclear technology, warplanes and civilian aircraft:

France is … hoping to strike key defence deals with India which is in the market for 126 new warplanes, a purchase worth billions of dollars. A deal for the supply of 43 Airbus commercial aircraft to state-run Indian airlines was also signed during the visit in a deal estimated at $2.5bn. [Link]

At the same time, Chirac defended efforts to prevent Mittal from taking over Belgian based steel maker Arcelor, saying that there was no racism involved:

Mr Chirac said on Monday that in principle France had absolutely “nothing against a non-European taking over a European company”. “The concerns that have been expressed are entirely legitimate. I do not understand what the fuss is about,” he said. [Link]

It’s the old dual standard - free trade for you, but not for us, right? Keep this up, Jacques my boy, and you’ll be eating Freedom Fries with your humble pie the next time you visit India …

Here are excerpts from The Daily Show on Dubya’s South Asia trip:

Sub-Continental Divide: The deal: our scientists will help India build nuclear reactors if their children stop crushing us in spelling bees. We’re trying so hard. I mean, for god’s sake, your names already have, like, 20 letters in them. That’s a huge advantage…

Holy shit, what is that? That’s a potato? India is so kicking our ass!

Obligatory geography lesson for American viewers

Insight on India and Pakistan: Resident Expert John Hodgman takes a look at India and Pakistan… which are two different countries.

My fofatminions, I’ve been hearing back-chatter about the mystery of me. Rrrreeeally? I’m so flattered, though gentlemen don’t kiss and tell, they kiss and post.

But as I am a gentle and one-track uncle, let’s talk about how Everything Comes From Desiland. A study just published in a British science journal pushes the idea that the “Loch Ness monster” was actually an Indian elephant on its way to performing in a circus:

Neil Clark, curator of paleontology at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, sees striking similarities between descriptions of Nessie and what an Indian elephant looks like while swimming. And perhaps not coincidentally, a traveling circus featuring elephants passed by the misty lake in the 1930s at the height of the monster sightings.

“It is quite possible that people not used to seeing a swimming elephant — the vast bulk of the animal is submerged, with only a thick trunk and a couple of humps visible,” thought they saw a monster, Clark said in an interview Tuesday…

But he said the vast majority of sightings occurred not long after 1933, the first year of the A82, a road that runs alongside the lake. Around that time, Mills’s traveling circus was visiting nearby Inverness and “would have stopped on the banks of Loch Ness to allow their animals to rest.”

You can judge for yourself whether Nessie is desi. Take a long, sensitive look…

Convincing, na? One shadowy mystery solved, one to go.

Only fools in pools see lumps and trunks as things that go plunk in the night. That dark summer night, in your jacuzzi, that was me. My humps, your aquifer, please excuse. I was on my way to performing in a circus.

Many of you may remember my previous post about the two Lodi, CA men (father and son) being tried for terrorism:

U.S. v. Hamid Hayat and Umer Hayat

Federal criminal charges alleging that a 47-year-old California father and his 22-year-old son lied to the FBI about training at and/or visiting al Qaeda terrorist and jihadi training camps in Pakistan. (June 7, 2005)

The Los Angeles Times provides details from their ongoing trial:

In a 2004 visit to a clandestine camp in Pakistan, Umer Hayat said he witnessed nearly 1,000 terrorist trainees — masked like “ninja turtles” — slashing curved swords at dummies with images of President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

In a videotaped interrogation by FBI agents shown in federal court Tuesday, Hayat said trainees at the camp allegedly attended by his son also practiced pole vaulting “like 50 feet” so they could leap rivers.

Hayat, 47, an ice cream truck driver, and his son Hamid, 23, both of Lodi, are on trial in Sacramento. Hamid Hayat is accused of attending a terrorist training camp, and both are accused of lying to federal agents.

The son is the one who the FBI thinks visited the terrorist training camp and he faces up to 39 years in prison. The dad, who faces up to 16 years in prison, is basically accused of trying to protect his son by covering up the facts. Here is the part that got my attention though. I have seen this a thousand times on episodes of NYPD Blue or The Shield, but it caught me off guard to see it in real life, even though I know how it’s done. Check it out:

As in the videotaped interrogation of Hamid Hayat shown earlier in the trial, the FBI agents did most of the talking and sometimes appeared to reassure the Hayats, who speak halting English, about their actions.

FBI agent Timothy Harrison described attending training camps in Pakistan as “an important part of growing up there.” FBI agent Gary Schaaf characterized terrorist camps as a rite of passage for Pakistani males. Another agent described Umer Hayat’s visit to the camp as the equivalent of a father inspecting a child’s college campus.

Defense attorney Johnny L. Griffin said Umer Hayat was “psychologically bullied and emotionally pressured into doing whatever the FBI agents wanted him to say or do.”

Why the hell didn’t they have a lawyer present? Were they tricked into speaking on the record without one because they didn’t understand English too well, or because they just didn’t want one?

Applegeeks is an anime-style Web comic drawn by two desi students at University of Maryland, College Park, Mohammad ‘Hawk’ Haque and Ananth Panagariya. They got a shout-out in last week’s Newsweek for a potential book deal:

Haque

Panagariya

As a sign that they’re settling in, some of the parents of these twentysomethings are beginning to see that prestige can be measured in more than M.D.s. “In the end, if you do excel, you’re going to succeed in your field,” [Arvind Panagariya, an economics professor at Columbia University] concedes, referring to his 22-year-old son, whose Web comic Applegeeks is in negotiations to be published as a book. [Link]

It’s lushly drawn with mostly geek humor, but Haque occasionally throws in references to Islam and discrimination:

Mr. Squirrely - The squirrel with mysterious powers and the ability to communicate with Hawk. Possibly a delusion brought on by Hawk’s Ramadan fasting…

Jayce torturing Hawk during Ramadan. Ramadan is a Muslim holiday which calls for fasting. Hawk follows this tradition and during it, Jayce often teases him by eating immense portions of food. Mr. Squirrely’s first appearance is during one of Hawk’s fasts. [Link]

UMD is also the alma mater of Liberty Meadows creator Frank Cho. That’s at least three Asian-American cartoonists from one campus — must be something in the water. But both strips’ obsessions with cartoon vixens is classic geek.

Related post: Smashing icons

If you use Google Desktop or a browser which snapshots pages, could you please paste the last few days of our News tab into an email for me?

I’ve thoroughly b0rked some of the summaries on our News tab while carelessly editing the database by hand. Right now I’ve got only the last couple of pages saved.

The perpetrator will be thoroughly self-abused. Thanks in advance!

Update: Now fully restored using Google Desktop cache (thanks, Ashvin and others).

A bit of an oldie (forgive me, work’s been a beeyatch). Economist Robert Samuelson writing for MSNBC, hits an issue recently discussed on Sepia Mutiny - the much feared Science & Engineering gap with India & China.

Samuelson’s retort is multi-pronged. First, the gap with India/China isn’t as crazy as the numbers might suggest it to be -

Judged realistically, China and India aren’t yet out-producing the United States in engineers. Widely publicized figures have them graduating 600,000 and 350,000 engineers a year respectively, from six to 10 times the U.S. level. But researchers at Duke University found the Chinese and Indian figures misleading. They include graduates with two- or three-year degrees—similar to “associate degrees” from U.S. community colleges. And the American figures excluded computer science graduates. Adjusted for these differences, the U.S. degrees jump to 222,335. Per million people, the United States graduates slightly more engineers with four-year degrees than China and three times as many as India.

…Only about 4 percent of the U.S. workforce consists of scientists and engineers.

Secondly, even if the gap is real, econ 101 would dictate that the “shortage” should reveal itself in engineering salaries (on average). And yet….

The Solomon Amendment is a Federal law which directs that certain Federal funds be withheld from recipient colleges and universities that do not grant military recruiters access to their campuses on a level equal to that provided to any other employer.

The Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), an association of law schools and professors that oppose discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, alleged that the Solomon Amendment infringed on its First Amendment freedoms of speech and association due to the military’s discriminatory recruitment practices (i.e., “don’t ask, don’t tell”). (See Abhi’s previous post on the case here.)

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled against FAIR yesterday, issuing an opinion [.pdf] that upholds the constitutionality of the statute and that in effect gives FAIR three-snaps in a Z-formation (i.e., the “Zorro snap”). (While some legal commentators predicted a unanimous outcome, I honestly did not think a case this contested in the public sphere would yield an 8-0 result.)

Joan Biskupic of USA TODAY described the Court’s reasoning:

“Accommodating the military’s message does not affect the law schools’ speech, because the schools are not speaking when they host interviews and recruiting receptions.”

[T]he basic communications required of colleges were bulletin board notices and e-mails [which] hardly could be compared to the kind of “compelled” government speech that has been invalidated through the years, such as a West Virginia law that required schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and to salute the American flag, or a New Hampshire law that ordered the state motto — “Live Free or Die” — to be on license plates. [Link]

As this astute (and hopefully single) desi notes on her blog, Mia Culpa:

The decision boosts the Bush administration as it struggles to maintain recruiting levels to wage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a defeat for Harvard, Yale, Columbia and other universities that accused the government of intruding on academic freedom. [Link]

The good ol’ U.S. of A.: alleviating poverty, one five-star doggie hotel room at a time…

An argument broke out between US security personnel and the management of the [five-star] Le Meridien Hotel in New Delhi on Wednesday over the accommodation of 60 sniffer dogs that are part of President George W Bush’s security entourage. The US Embassy booked 70 rooms in the hotel in the Indian capital, where Bush will travel on Thursday. However, the hotel management was surprised to find that the rooms had been reserved for dogs.

These weren’t just any old pooches, they were decorated officers of the U.S. Secret Service:The hotel management was surprised to find that the rooms had been reserved for dogs

US security personnel accompanying the sniffer dogs were offended when the management told them that dogs were not allowed on the hotel premises, saying that they were “security officers”. The External Affairs Ministry had to intervene and arrange for the rooms to be allotted to the American “officer” dogs. Each “security officer” dog has been provided an air-conditioned room with an American attendant. [Link]

… the newly revamped Le Meridien in New Delhi has some “special guests”… The hotel is playing host to an “important delegation” from the United States — the K9 dog squad. But the word “dog” is never mentioned in front of these elite canines: they are referred to as “officers”… Kennels have been flown in specially for them… The “officers”, who have been decorated for their service, have their own private area in Le Meridien. [Link]

Upon hearing of the K9 unit’s digs, half the population of Bihar attempted to enlist

As usual, I’ve been keeping an eye out for desis in politics here in the U.S. Just over a month ago I read that Kamil Hasan had been appointed as a Member-at-Large of the Democratic Party by DNC chairman Howard Dean. There wasn’t too much about him at the time but today the San Jose Mercury News features him:

Kamil Hasan of Saratoga has a new job: collecting serious cash from the Indo-American community for the Democratic National Committee.

That job may not be as powerful as senator or congressman. But for the Bay Area’s roughly 155,000 Indo-American community members, Hasan’s appointment represents another step the well-educated, affluent immigrant group is taking to gain political clout. His goal is to raise at least $5 million through a newly formed Indian fundraising council in time for the next presidential election.

What’s most important, community members said, is that the appointment isn’t just about Hasan: It’s about the voice of the entire Indo-American community, about 2 million strong.

“It’s basically a seat at the table,” Hasan said in an interview at Hitek Venture Partners in Mountain View, a company he founded in 1995 that funds about 30 high-tech start-ups. “It’s a clear acknowledgment that the Indo-American community has made major contributions. We want to make a major impact on where this country should go, and to be involved as a player.”

A couple of things. First, is this really about the entire Indo-American community as Hasan believes? I don’t think so. This is about money and the members of the community that have it.

Kamil and Talat Hasan have long been leaders in the Indo-American community, where Hasan is known as a nice guy who plays golf at the Saratoga Country Club and a father who is strict about once-a-week family dinners with his daughters, Minal, 24, and Saima, 20. Hasan was born into a privileged family in Aligarh, India, in 1944. His father was a wealthy landowner. He came to the United States in 1968 to study engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology….

“This is important because this says to the community, ‘We value you,’ ” he said. “And it’s a smart thing for the politicians to do, because this expands their base. And as we all know, this is a community with a lot of money.”

Those are two separate things. Valuing one’s money is a lot different than valuing the “community.” Or perhaps they are no longer separate things in contemporary American politics. Of course, Hasan also recognizes that he may have a problem herding cats:

The challenge for Hasan is to be the voice for a community whose members hail from one of the most diverse countries in the world. It’s not clear how many Indo-Americans are Republicans or Democrats, though Hasan is trying to figure that out. He estimates the breakdown is about 70 percent Democrats, 30 percent Republicans. Even within their own party, many Indo-Americans support different candidates for governor. Others disagree on whether to invest in local or national politics.

The NYT, the Economist and several U.S. congressmen have been on a sanctimonious, anti-India tear after the India-U.S. deal for nuclear power generation.

The NYT op/ed committee for Dubya’s South Asia trip

It’s just baffling why Mr. Bush traveled halfway around the world to stand right next to one of his most important allies against terrorists — and embarrass him… when Mr. Bush agreed to carve out an exception to global nonproliferation rules for India, it should have been obvious that Pakistani opinion would demand the same privileged treatment… [Link]

Fast-forward to Thursday’s nuclear deal with India, in which President Bush agreed to share civilian nuclear technology with India despite its nuclear weapons programs and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty… This would be a bad idea at any time… Mr. Bush might as well have tied a pretty red bow around his India nuclear deal and mailed it as a gift to Tehran. [Link]

President Bush wants to carve out an exception for India. That’s the worst possible message to send to other countries — Iran comes to mind — that America and its nuclear allies in Europe are trying to keep off the nuclear weapons bandwagon. Already, Pakistani officials are requesting the same deal for their country, although it is a request that is unlikely to be granted. Congress would have to approve this nuclear deal, and it should kill it. [Link]

What has emerged on Capitol Hill is an alliance of conservative Republicans, who are concerned that the deal will encourage Iranian intransigence, and liberal Democrats, who charge that the Bush administration has effectively scrapped the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty… “People are worried about the precedent of establishing a full-fledged cooperation with India while we’re wagging our finger at North Korea and Iran”…

“This deal not only lets India amass as many nuclear weapons as it wants, it looks like we made no effort to try to curtail them,” said George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is Santa Claus negotiating. The goal seems to have been to give away as much as possible.” [Link]

You have all most likely heard of the Kennewick Man:

In 1996, there was a boat race on the Columbia River, near Kennewick, in Washington State, in the extreme northwestern United States. Two fans pulled ashore to get a good viewpoint of the race, and, in the shallow water at the edge of the bank, they found a human skull. They took the skull to the county coroner, who passed it to archaeologist James Chatters. Chatters and others went to the Columbia and retrieved a nearly complete human skeleton, with a long, narrow face suggestive of a person of European descent. But the skeleton was confusing to Chatters; he noticed that the teeth had no cavities and for a 40-50 year old man (the most recent studies suggest he was in his thirties), the teeth were extremely ground down. Cavities are the result of a corn-based (or sugar-enhanced) diet; grinding damage usually results from grit in the diet. Most modern people don’t have grit in their food, but do consume sugar in some form and so do have cavities. And Chatters spotted a projectile point embedded in his right pelvis, a Cascade point, normally dated between 5,000 and 9,000 years before the present. It was clear that the point had been there while the individual was alive; the lesion in the bone had partially healed. Chatters sent off a bit of the bone to be radiocarbon dated. Imagine his astonishment when he received the radiocarbon date as over 9,000 years ago. [Link]

The cover of Time Magazine this week is dedicated to new discoveries about the Kennewick Man reported inside. For many years his remains were the subject of a heated court battle. Native Americans claimed that they had the right to reclaim and bury his remains (thereby preventing scientific study) because he was one of their own. The Time Magazine article (subscription currently required) explains how forensics reveals that the Kennewick Man was not racially what we would consider Native American, but rather Polynesian or Ainu. He therefore predates existing Native American tribes. Indolink.com takes it a step further and includes speculation that he may have been from South Asia. It gets tricky because some people use “South Asia” when they really mean “Southeast Asia”:

Now it appears that analysis of Kennewick Man, places him “closer to southern Asians and nearly equidistant to modern Native Americans and Polynesians.”

That’s because the skull “appears to have strongest morphological affinities with populations in southern Asia, and not with American Indians or Europeans in the reference samples” according to one study.

The interpretations by anthropologists Joseph F. Powell and Jerome C. Rose are based on a scientific technique called craniofacial morphometric analysis. It involves detailed study of the shape of the skull and face, using a sophisticated method called multivariate analysis. In some cases, more than 60 different dimensions of a skull are measured and compared with comparable dimensions considered typical of specific racial groups. [Link]

Bush wasn’t the only imperial American to visit India last week. Mega-movie star, sometime rapper, and potential aspirant to the presidency Will Smith was also there as well. While he was in India to promote a new English language movie channel, he graciously complimented the competition, endearing himself to Indians with his love for Bollywood:

“The first Hindi film that I saw was Sarkar,” he explained, “and I was blown away by the Big B (megastar Amitabh Bachchan). I want to be known as Big W from today.” [Link]

“Just recently I got to know the number of films Bollywood makes a year - a whopping 800. And each with its share of song, music, dance and drama… I am simply enticed to be part of it” [Link]

Although his representatives denied that Smith had any concrete plans for a crossover movie, he did spend a whole day meeting with various filmi types, so something may be in the works.

For me, the highlight of Smith’s visit was his appearence on Indian Idol. There he imitated Tom Cruise by jumping up on the sofa (scaring the presenter Mini Mathur half to death) where he mugged and sang:

Telling the contestants how to deal with butterflies in their stomachs, Will said, “It’s hard going on stage, and I used to have a weird feeling in my gut too. Sometimes, I still do. And when I really want to make sure I’m ready for stage, I go to a really crowded place, like a mall or something, I just climb up onto something (jumps onto the sofa) and do this!” He screams his guts out, wildly, his lunatic expressions all over the place. [Link]

[To see a flip book animation of his performance, click here] While on the show, he not only performed “Getting Jiggy With It” but he also ventured a duet of “Aati Kya Khandala” with one of the contestants. Unfortunately, one of the male contestants was considerably more self-conscious than Smith was:

Will got off the couch to raucous applause, encouraging the lad right next to him, Sandeep, to do the same. “Go ahead, man, go for it! Your turn now!”

And this is where the Idol hopeful blew it. If Will Smith tells you to leap onto a sofa and yell your head off on television, you do it. Sandeep hesitantly got to his feet, perched atop the couch as if made to stand to attention, and then, instead of just shouting, he fumbled around for a microphone. Even as Will kept egging him on, Sandeep managed a lame ‘Woo’ sound, then stood there grinning haplessly. [Link]

Why am I not surprised?

Sitting in the Hirshhorn museum’s Ring Auditorium after waiting for over an hour on Saturday, I really wanted to like Water, Deepa Mehta’s last in her trilogy of films based on the elements. I wanted to write a glowing review of it for you all, but after sitting through it (and the really, really long introductory conversation between Mehta and the Smithsonian’s Manjula Kumar) I came away simply underwhelmed. It wasn’t that the movie was horrible, it wasn’t. It was just unimpressive. I think back to Mehta’s Fire, it was unique for the time of its release and blessed with the presence of Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das; I found Earth, the second installment of the trilogy phenomenal, visually stunning, musically evocative, and well directed. Contrastingly in Water, I saw a cast of mostly uninspired acting, drab sets, and music that just faded into the background (perhaps by design?).

The film was shot in Sri Lanka, and while watching the movie, Sri Lanka’s lush landscapes easily gives the non-India locale away. I can’t say for sure that in 1938 there were no palm trees in Varanasi, but I am not buying that the city’s ghats were surrounded by them. I found Seema Biswas (Shakuntala) of Bandit Queen fame and the relative newcomer Sarala (Chuyia) playing the young widow excellent, but the beautiful Lisa Ray (Kalyani) was mediocre at best. Shakuntala’s dutiful strength and Chuyia’s naïve intelligence were indeed stark contrasts to the rather forgettable Kalyani (spoiler warning: one of my favorite scenes shows Chuyia sitting amongst the praying widows, fearlessly blurting a question to the pundit asking, “what happenned to male widows?”).

I wanted to be moved by the climactic scenes featuring MK Gandhi, but I found them artificial and contrived, which only added to the hokey vibe of the movie. The film, it’s not bad, but I didn’t find it great. For the curious however, it’s a decent timepass.

M. Night Shyamalan had a two-minute-long AmEx ad on the Oscars telecast tonight (watch or download — thanks, Arzan and Sonia). The ad was lots of fun, a riff on Shyamalan’s odd worlds. Manoj Night was all slicked out in necklace, fitted suit and fancy haircut. Ennis Del Mar would approve.

I heard there was a short Ismail Merchant clip in the obituary montage. Sajit adds that Aishwarya Rai’s L’Oreal ad was shown at the end.

Out of the nominees, here are my personal should-have-beens (see also the complete list of winners):

Picture: Munich (winner: Crash)

Director: Steven Spielberg for Munich (winner: Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain)

Actor: Joaquin Phoenix for Walk the Line (winner: Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote). It’s a travesty that Reese Witherspoon won her Best Actress award for Walk the Line, while Phoenix, the movie’s heart, was jilted for his dark, intense performance.

Yes, Hoffman disappeared entirely inside that role like a good interper, in a way you rarely see any more. But the faults of the rest of the movie bleed over. Capote was so slow and aggressively anti-stim, so sensory isolationist, it literally almost put me to sleep in the theater, slower than watching paint dry. As Anthony Lane wrote about a different film, it had ‘the touch of mummification which wins awards’ and an elegiac tone that was stultifying.

Crash blindly jabbed your emotional buttons. It was a race drama by the guy who wrote Million Dollar Baby, and about as subtle, i.e. not at all. It felt as pointlessly corrosive as downing a bottle of Tabasco sauce, making it upsetting to sit through, every key character spewing racist invective. It felt like reading Usenet: messy, undirected, didn’t go anywhere. You’ve got my time, now make a point.

The movie was way too pat, like feature columnists in small papers in the ‘burbs. Everyone just happened to bump into everyone else in the L.A. urban sprawl. I’ve seen that narrative structure before, but it wasn’t used well here — it was utterly contrived. The carjackers were like scholars. The Latino dude who lived in a ghetto barely had any accent. If you’re going to deal with race, be accurate. This movie veered into Lifetime schmaltz often, as mawkish as much of Bollywood.

In President Bush’s most brilliant photo op ever, he invited members of the Pakistani national cricket team to the US embassy for a private lesson in cricket.

President Bush met Pakistani cricket captain Inzaman-ul-Haq and opening batsman Salman Butt amid tight security at the US embassy in Islamabad.

Watched by a crowd of schoolchildren, he was shown the correct way of holding a cricket bat before being led to the crease to face some bowling.

One of the balls from the Pakistani captain bounced high, striking the president on the shoulder.

Mr Bush also tried his hand at bowling. [Link]

No word as to whether batsman Butt was bestowed one of the President’s honorary nicknames when he was standing in the crease, but we can only hope.

Those of you concerned about the President’s safety while learning cricket will be pleased to learn that they replaced cricket balls with tennis balls for the purposes of this demonstration, so while the President was hit by a ball, he was not injured.

See a fuller squence of photos here; my favorite is this one of President Bush holding the tennis ball as if it were really heavy before bowling. And yes, he maintains his trademark tight lipped grin in most of the photos.

Gurbaj Singh Multani, a Sikh student in Québec, was playing during recess when, oops, his kirpan, a ceremonial Sikh dagger, fell out of his clothing. The mother of another student noticed, and minutes later the principal of the school, Danielle Descoteaux, informed Gurbaj that he would not be permitted to attend the school so long as he continued to carry this “weapon” on his person.

The school board agreed with Descoteaux’s initial reaction, stating that the kirpan violated its code of conduct, which prohibits the carrying of weapons. The board’s council of commissioners upheld that decision, but told Gurbaj and his parents that Gurbaj would be permitted to wear a kirpan-shaped pendant or a kirpan that was made of some other material (e.g., plastic or wood), not metal. Gurbaj’s father sued, claiming his son’s rights under the Canadian Charter were violated.

The Supreme Court of Canada unanimously sided with Gurbaj’s father, holding that, “The council of commissioners’ decision prohibiting [Gurbaj] from wearing his kirpan to school infringes his freedom of religion,” as guaranteed by Section 1 of that Charter.

The Court described the importance of this specific right as applied to Gurbaj:

Religious tolerance is a very important value of Canadian society. If some students consider it unfair that [Gurbaj] may wear his kirpan to school while they are not allowed to have knives in their possession, it is incumbent on the schools to discharge their obligation to instil in their students this value that is at the very foundation of our democracy. A total prohibition against wearing a kirpan to school undermines the value of this religious symbol and sends students the message that some religious practices do not merit the same protection as others. Accommodating [Gurbaj] and allowing him to wear his kirpan under certain conditions demonstrates the importance that our society attaches to protecting freedom of religion and to showing respect for its minorities. The deleterious effects of a total prohibition… outweigh its salutary effects.

Please welcome our new guest blogger Dave Sidhu, of the excellent Discrimination and National Security Initiative Blog. The other mutineers wanted to do the full hazing ritual on him but I had to intervene since Dave is a friend. We both went to GW and wrote together at the now defunct Satya Circle. Dave is a civil rights attorney with the federal government and will be starting a federal clerkship this year. You will be proud to know that Dave has also lived next door to Zerobridge’s Mubi and Mohsin Din for the last 22 years and and is a card-carrying member of everyone’s favorite group, the Federalist Society.

The Tamil Tigers can somehow afford a parallel government in northern Sri Lanka with a small navy, visa services and traffic tickets:

When you drive through the “border” post into their territory, you have to set your watch back half-an-hour to Tiger time…

During a recent visit, as I drove down a quiet country road, a Tamil Tiger policeman took out his gun… we were hit - with a speeding fine. There aren’t many rebel groups that take traffic violations seriously.

… it is one of the absurdities of the situation in Sri Lanka that you can find yourself debating the finer points of highway etiquette with a group better known for its devastating use of suicide bombers. [Link]

That anecdote actually lays bare the real reason for speeding tickets in every government: revenues. The Tigers get some of theirs by extorting from a community which generally supports their politics. They track which auntie has given money and which hasn’t and send enforcers to their homes in Canada (thanks, Ananthan). It’s their equivalent of taxation:

They apologized when they came knocking on her door one night… the men came sometime before winter began last year, and they asked for a monthly donation of $50 for the “Tamil cause.”

After an exhausting hour of debate, the Sri Lankan-born woman relented and agreed to $30 a month. But when she stopped her payments three months later, the men came back. Now they demanded a one-time payment of $2,000. “They said if I give them the money this time, they’ll stop coming…”

[At the LTTE checkpoint,] her luggage was checked and she was told to write down personal information, including her passport number, if she wanted to travel… into the Tamil Tiger heartland… to visit family…

After they stamped her Tiger papers in Kilinochchi, she says a man at the office talked to her about donations. He knew that she’d refused to donate in Vavuniya, so he told her that he’d sent her information to Canada and someone would be in touch with her after she returned.

That’s why she believes the men who came to her door last year were sent by the LTTE. “They know this information of how many times I refused to give them money and whom I refused,” she says. But she won’t go to the police because she fears for the life of her family both here and back home…

New Internet censorship in Pakistan aimed at the Danish cartoons of Muhammed has inflicted more collateral damage than a wayward JDAM. All Google-hosted blogs have now been banned (thanks, SloganMurugan):

Pakistan telecom authorities have blocked several websites inviting people to draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad… Bloggers in Pakistan became first became aware of the ban on 28 February when they were unable to access a popular blog hosting site, Blogspot. One of the blocked sites is hosted on [Google] Blogspot, which led to the blocking of all web journals hosted on the site… They say they have still been able to edit and update their blogs, but not able to read them… [Link]

… the govt. must have ordered local ISP’s to block certain websites. All the major ISP’s in Pakistan are blocking weblogs hosted at blogspot.com. [Link]

Blogger, the editing half, was spared the axe. There’s been no official announcement, although last week Pakistan’s highest court started ordering ISPs to block sites carrying the cartoons:

The Supreme Court on Thursday directed the government to block internet sites displaying sacrilegious cartoons and called explanation from authorities concerned as to why these sites had not been blocked earlier… Two petitions were filed… seeking complete blockage of sites showing blasphemous depictions and… seeking registration of cases under blasphemy. [Link]

Any secular democracy’s least-favorite phrase: ‘injures religious sentiments.’ Disheartened Pakistani bloggers are blaming bureaucratic ineptness and going around the problem via proxies. With respect to freedom of speech, Pakistan is not China:

Pakistani bloggers agree the blocking of Blogspot cannot be intentional… [Link]

Only Indian kids would go to such lengths to finish a class assignment.

The University of Maryland’s student paper, the Diamondback is reporting that three graduate students from India (two men and a woman) were detained and questioned for nearly four hours by Montgomery County police early Tuesday morning for using a device to track wireless communication signals for a class assignment (thanks masked tipster). Neighbors reported the three to the police for suspicious activity because they had been driving through Silver Spring, Md (a suburb of Washington DC) at about 15 miles per hour with elaborate equipment in their rental vehicle.

Yeah, it sounds shady. If a car was constantly roaming around my neighborhood from about 10 pm to 2 in the morning, I too would probably be a little suspicious, especially at that hour. Well, so were the police.

At about 2 a.m. early Tuesday morning while driving through a residential Silver Spring neighborhood, the students noticed a police car following them and flashing its lights. The students were stopped and answered questions about their identities, equipment and assignment, and were then escorted by police back to I-495 and sent home.

You would think it would have ended at that. It is kind of funny, a trio of Indian students geekily get pulled over, not for partying or do something illegal, but for doing their homework. The crappy thing is, it didn’t end there.

Police from Montgomery and Prince George’s counties rejoined the students at their Berwyn House Road apartments, where after more questioning, an officer copied down the equipment’s serial numbers and informed one of the male students his laptop appeared on a list of stolen electronics.Officers detained them there for nearly two hours, questioned them, photographed them, recorded detailed descriptions of their physical appearances and inspected their visas, passports, university identifications and international driving permits.

Now I am a bit confused. Why would the police need to follow them home? The students showed the police their ids, equipment, and explained to the police the class assignment. What was the point in following them home and recording all of their personal data? And the bit about taking the laptop I am not too clear on.

“Everyone was shocked, dumbfounded, speechless,” the female student said. “This has never happened before in our lives. I was very angry. I didn’t appreciate the harassment.” The students were released by officers about 5 a.m. Tuesday and later informed their professor and department.

And yet, it all could have probably went away had they called their professor earlier. The good Indian students that they are, they didn’t want to bother him.

They said they didn’t want to call us in the middle of the night and wake us up,” said Steve Tretter, director of the program. “I told them they were crazy and should have called us immediately.” Tretter said he and administrators were upset for the students.

It seems that there’s a new way to become suspected of being a terrorist - try to pay off your credit cards. At a time when debt is all-American, the Department of Homeland Security gets called in if you try to balance your personal budget.

The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522. And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges’ behavior was found questionable… They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. [Link]

DHS got notified for a measily $6,522 payment? I mean, I’m sure that Al Qaeda loves shopping at J.C. Penny, but still. And this happened to a white family with nothing else “suspicious” in their background. Heck, they were even from Texas (although they left after they retired). Can you imagine if they had an accent? Or a furrin’ name?

Here’s my favorite part:

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn’t changed…the money doesn’t move until the threat alert is lifted. [Link]

That’s right - not only does DHS get involved, but they stop your payment from going through. You’re performing a legitimate commercial transaction, and they’re preventing it. Do they pay your interest during the period that they’re pondering how much of a threat you pose to the country? What happens if they don’t get around to making a decision right away? Hey, if you have nothing to hide, why are you complaining? [Via Ishbadiddle]

Not since that hottie Natalie Portman has a freshman at Yale an ivy-league freshman created this much buzz. Meet 27-year-old former Taliban spokesperson Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi:

The Before and After pictures (via the NY Times)

The University of Yale has a freshman who is thankful to have landed up in the prestigious institution rather than the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, a former Taliban spokesperson, who has the dubious distinction of having come in contact with terror mastermind Osama bin Laden has joined a non-degree course, which includes a class on terrorism… Turned away initially from a Taliban office in Kandahar, Hashemi had offered his skills as a computer operator because of his “high proficiency in English”, the New York Times quoted the freshman as saying.

But later, adding a couple of years to his age, he was accepted and became a part of the hardline Islamic regime that also brought him in contact with 9/11 mastermind Laden.

“I saw bin Laden after he was brought to Kandahar in 1997,” Rahmatullah told the Times.

Hashemi fled Afghanistan for Pakistan after the September 11 bombings. [Link]

Hashemi has had a brief flash of fame once before. He appeared in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11:

As the chief spokes-terrorist for the Taliban, Hashemi traveled extensively throughout Europe and the United States. While speaking at the Atlantic Council in 2001, Hashemi was confronted with a woman who detailed the horrors facing the women of Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban. He dismissed her as if she were an insolent child and announced to the woman: “I’m really sorry for your husband. He might have a very difficult time with you. Hashemi’s disgusting comments were immortalized in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911…” [Link]

Over a week ago the New York Times did a fantastic 12-page in-depth story on Hashemi (a must read article).

You just have to wonder what the hell they must have been thinking:

Two Indian-American brothers, living in New York, made a hoax bomb call to the airport officials in a bid to prevent their sister from boarding a flight out of the city.

Authorities said Amandeep Singh, 24, and Gurpreet Singh, 26, were arrested last month on charges of telephoning airport officials and saying that terrorists had planted a bomb in the plane.

The bomb threat call was made with an intension to prevent their sister from taking off to a different US city in an attempt to marry her boyfriend, who is also an Indian immigrant. The brothers wanted the sister to marry to a doctor. [Link]

If I felt any sympathy at all for these two I lost it when I read that last sentence. However, their plan actually worked! For like a day.

Though their sister was unable to leave the city at that time, she has now married her boyfriend, according to news reports.

So what kind of unsuitable boy did the sister end up marrying then? A lawyer, a finance-type guy, an astrobiologist?

Sources said that Singh’s parents “went berserk” when their 30-year-old daughter announced she was going to marry a gas station owner.

The enraged parents set up an arranged marriage for the woman with a doctor in India, the sources said. [Link]

Ouch. There isn’t a more perfect storm I can think of that could cause Indian parents to go “berserk.”

Federal agents monitoring movement of tickets at MacArthur spotted the cancellation, and headed to Queens to question the sister. She led them to her brothers - and to other family members involved in the threat, the sources said.

The brothers face up to a year in prison if convicted of the current charges. The men, who have been in the U.S. for more than 15 years, could also face additional charges by the federal government. [Link]

On my Yahoo start page this morning the picture below stared back at me:

An Indian girl holds a placard during a protest against President Bush in the southern Indian city of Bangalore March 1, 2006. REUTERS/Jagadeesh Nv

I had two thoughts. First, isn’t it just precious how an Indian kid would attach the honorific “uncle” to even a protest sign? I had to laugh out loud at that. Second, I felt conflicted. I don’t approve of children at protests. I feel that taking a child to certain types of protests is like giving a child a gun without teaching them proper gun safety. I believe it is more important to properly educate a child in all aspects of an issue and encourage them to investigate it on their own, rather than take them along to mindlessly protest something. I think it is VERY important to teach a child about the realities and injustices in the world and when to stand up for a principle, but I often see images in the media that hint at the fact that the children holding signs are mostly a form of propaganda. Out of curiosity I did a quick search for some other recent protest pictures featuring young children.

Salman Rushdie joins a group of prominent intellectuals & public figures in an anti-“Islamist” manifesto published in the now famous Jyllands-Posten (reprinted here in full because I agree with it so much) -

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

As most readers know, President Bush made a not so surprise visit to Afghanistan on Wednesday before his eventual arrival in India. After India he intends to go on to Pakistan. That is THREE South Asian nations in one week. By my rough count however, there are only TWO South Asian journalists along for the ride on Air Force One. The first is our old friend Raghubir “the Foil” Goyal. Word on the street is that “the Foil” is as necessary to the White House Press Office as the “Football” is to the President:

He may not be one the most high-profile media persons accompanying US President George W Bush on his India visit, but Indian American journalist Raghubir Goyal is often the “perfect foil” for the White House spokesperson when he is caught in a tight spot.

“I will be on Air Force One. A few of the other regulars in the press will also be there. They rotate everyone every month,” Goyal told IANS just before boarding the flight for New Delhi.

Goyal has been a White House pressperson for many years and is often ridiculed for his softball questions that deal exclusively with India and for which he has been labelled the “Goyal foil” - or a way out for White House spokesman Scott McClellan when he is in a tight spot.

I tell them, ‘But I get only one chance to ask a question and I want to get in my question about India instead of the other subjects the media is talking about’.”[Link]

“The Foil” now even has an entire website dedicated to his heroic exploits. The second desi reporter may not be as infamous, but she certainly has a large audience. It is Niharika Acharya of Voice of America:

Niharika is VOA Hindi TV’s lead anchor and correspondent. She co-hosts VOA Hindi’s weekly news and current affairs program “Duniya” (The World), aired live on India’s leading TV news channel Aaj Tak. Niharika also contributes to VOA Hindi Radio as fill-in host for the weekly call-in shows ‘Hello India’ and ‘Hello America’, and her television reports are aired on radio as well…

As part of VOA Hindi TV’s collaboration with Aaj Tak, which claims an audience of 30 million households in India, Niharika has also covered major news events including U.S. presidential elections, the 9/11 anniversaries, annual UN General Assembly sessions and important meetings between the leaders of India and the U.S. including President Bush’s meeting with the current and former Prime Ministers of India. [Link]

I dunno. I just find it kind of underwhelming that there aren’t more South Asian American journalists who were deemed by their news organizations to be qualified enough to be along for this ride. It seems like they would be in unique position to report on this story due to their inherent understanding of the cultures involved. Is Goyal the best we got to embed? I dream of the day when a mutinous blogger is allowed onto AF1.

See related posts: One-Track Uncle, Goyal’s toils

For me, watching Seven.11 was one of the theater highlights of 2005. It had the sharpest writing and the funniest set of desi and As-Am in-jokes I’ve seen in ages: custom-fit culture in a railroad apartment. The proprietors have done well for themselves behind the counter, unveiling a bigger show in a bigger theater this year:

This year’s line-up includes a kung-fu hustler, run-away teenagers, convenience store surprise reunions, a futuristic free-for-all for Manhattan, and not one but TWO original pop musicals, one of which leaves you questioning, “Who really did kill Mr. Naidu?”

If you’re anywhere new New York between March 30 and April 16, you have to see the musical farce, last year’s was side-splitting. The show’s creative constraint is a gimmick, but it works:

… Seven.11 Convenience Theatre marks its fourth year with a whole new set of seven plays [of 11 minutes each] all set in a convenience store…

The intense, bald and talented Andrew Guilarte returns from last year’s cast. Looking at the list is like watching a star team shed your favorite players (where have you gone, Joe Debarggio, and Lethia Nall, Kavi Ladnier, Anuvab Pal?). You hope the new faces will once again become sentimental favorites.

Featuring the ever-talented cast of Sturgis Adams, Meetu Chilana, Andrew Guilarte, Sean Krishnan, Stephen Tyrone Williams, John Wu, Alicia Ying

They were completely sold out last year, so buy ahead.

Related posts: Reclaiming Apu, Seven chutney squishies, make it quick

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