We’ve heard of Hollywood investing money in the Indian film industry. Now it looks like the cash money is already flowing in the opposite direction.

Last night when I was flipping channels, I paused to see the trailer for Chris Rock’s I Think I Love My Wife. Now, it wasn’t the trailer itself that made me stop flipping (it doesn’t look anything I’d pay ten dollars to watch). No, it was the fact that the UTV logo flashed on the screen, billed as the movie’s producer. Yes, that UTV. The same Indian production company that made Rang De Basanti, Don, and Chalte Chalte is apparently cranking out Hollywood movies now, too.

Although I couldn’t find any mention of ITILMW on UTV’s website, a few google searches confirmed my suspicion. According to Rediff:

UTV inked co-production deals with Fox Searchlight and Will Smith’s production company Overbrook Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment [back in 2006] to create and distribute films worldwide - making it the largest co-production deal out of South Asia worth $37 million. The $14 million production, I Think I Love My Wife, starring Chris Rock, will be UTV Motion Pictures’ second venture with Fox after Mira Nair’s The Namesake.

Here’s a story that bubbled up in the New York tabloids and local TV news a few days ago but didn’t make it any further. That’s because as incidents of police brutality go, the two shots fired into the legs of construction worker Talwinder Singh by off-duty NYPD officer Quillian Virgil don’t really seem, on current evidence, to be that egregious an abuse. In fact it seems that brother Talwinder (pictured, via NY Daily News) may well have put himself in position to get hurt through a series of frankly bizarre actions.

“OFF-DUTY COP SHOOTS ENRAGED PURSUER IN QUEENS,” blared the New York Post, making clear who it thinks was the victim in the confrontation that led to the shots being fired, near the corner of 103rd Avenue and 116th Street in Ozone Park, which in that stretch is heavily desi — Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Indo-Caribbeans from Guyana and Trinidad. (According to the 2000 census, the three census tracts that abut that particular corner are nearly one-third “Asian” — which around here means desi, with another 18% classified as “two or more races;” the foreign-born population is nearly 65%. In other words typical outer-borough New York, with these trends likely to have only accelerated since the census was taken.)

Anyway, piecing together the info — the Daily News has the fullest article — it seems that Talwinder Singh had already once thrown a brick through Sgt. Virgil’s home window before returning last Friday evening for more mischief. Apparently Talwinder had a metal exercise bar — one of these joints, specifically — and was using it to smash the sergeant’s screen door. Alerted by his wife, Virgil got out of bed and stepped outside to find Singh wilding out. The papers say Singh then pursued Virgil down the block and at some point Virgil stopped, turned, and told Singh to drop the metal bar. The reports say Singh then lunged at Virgil, who then shot him in the legs to immobilize him.

Without endorsing any particular version of events, the whole story seems a bit… unhinged. I mean, who goes and vandalizes a police officer’s house — repeatedly? There has to be some other dimension and the tabloids are happy to provide it:

Talwinder Singh, 20, reportedly was sneaking up to see his landlord’s wife, and neighbor Sgt. Quillian Virgil informed the husband, the source said.

Aha! The love interest! It’s alleged that the landlord then consulted Virgil for advice about how to evict the young rascal. Talwinder got wind of this and decided to go for revenge. Now the landlords haven’t been named so we don’t know if they’re desi — a good chance they are, but it’s piquant either way. However lips are sealed:

The landlord’s wife wasn’t talking about the man who lives one floor beneath her in a basement apartment.

“I have nothing to say,” she told reporters at the 116th St. home yesterday. “Nothing.”

Meanwhile the peanut gallery is weighing in:

Some neighbors described Talwinder Singh, a construction worker, as a troublemaker.

“These fellas were always drinking and fighting,” Nazimudin Mohamed, 47, said of Talwinder Singh and his relatives. “I knew something was going to happen.”

Talwinder was taken to Jamaica Hospital and charged with a variety of offenses. Internal Affairs is investigating Virgil’s side of the story. Again, we’ll see how it all shakes out but what I dig about this story is how archetypal it is, with respect to characters, motive and dénouement. You could take out the desi names and put in Italian, Irish or Greek ones and you’d have an American urban story from a previous wave of immigration and settlement. Or you could keep the characters and change the setting to London, for instance, and it would work the same way. It’s confirmation that there are some constants in metropolitan life, and, perhaps, of that old writer’s saw that claims there are only four plots in human affairs, and all stories are merely variations.

The big news out of Washington this morning was that the White House has confronted Pakistan about their lame efforts in going after terrorists within their borders:

President Bush has decided to send an unusually tough message to one of his most important allies, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, warning him that the newly Democratic Congress could cut aid to his country unless his forces become far more aggressive in hunting down operatives with Al Qaeda, senior administration officials say…

American intelligence officials have concluded that the terrorist infrastructure is being rebuilt, and that while Pakistan has attacked some camps, its overall effort has flagged…

For the time being, officials say, the White House has ruled out unilateral strikes against the training camps that American spy satellites are monitoring in North Waziristan, in Pakistan’s tribal areas on the border. The fear is that such strikes would result in what one administration official referred to as a “shock to the stability” of General Musharraf’s government. [Link]

I find some humor in the fact that Bush is telling Musharraf to be worried that the Democrats will be more stern than him. It is a little like a mother saying, “you better shape up or you will be in big trouble with daddy.”

The Blotter reports additional details:

In a highly unusual move, the deputy director of the CIA, Stephen R. Kappes, was flown to Pakistan to personally present President Pervez Musharraf today with “compelling” CIA evidence of al Qaeda’s resurgence on Pakistani soil, U.S. officials say.

Kappes joined Vice President Dick Cheney for the surprise showdown meeting in Musharraf’s office in Pakistan.

The CIA evidence reportedly included satellite photos and electronic intercepts of al Qaeda leaders operating in Pakistan. [Link]

Of course, we all know that if El General goes down then things could get a lot worse in Pakistan. And so the dance continues (at least until daddy comes home).

Oscar season has come and gone, and Indian film came nowhere close to being honored with Rang de Basanti failing to even make the foreign films shortlist and Water getting passed over. Reacting to RDB’s poor showing in the BAFTAs (the British Oscars), actor Naseeruddin Shah had this to say:

“We just don’t make films of an international standard… I really don’t think we make films that can match those from other parts of the world. And I am not referring to Hollywood - we make copies of Hollywood,” [Link]

Criticisms of Bollywood’s lack of originality and quality are nothing new, but coming from Shah they carry more weight. When I make similar statements, my Bollydefending friends justly point out that as an ABD I just don’t get the genre-specific joys, but it’s harder to rebut somebody who has acted in both mainstream Bollywood film and alternative cinema in India, appearing in over 130 films with 3 Filmfare magazine awards to his name. Furthermore, his statements appear to be more than an indictment against Bollywood; as quoted they are a criticism of the entire Indian film industry.

This is not to hold Hollywood up as an exemplar of good taste and originality. M.Night won worst director at this year’s Razzies and this year’s Best Film, The Departed, is a less exciting copy of Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs. [Granted it really won as a deferred reward for Scorcese, but still …]

What makes Shah’s criticism interesting is that he’s not saying India should be like Hollywood, instead he’s comparing India to other third world countries, saying that they produce better movies:

“We can’t match the types of films made in Iran for example, Poland, Japan, Mexico or Brazil, Vietnam or Korea… These countries are producing the most incredible movies and we are still plodding on with our boy-meets-girl safe, old formula. That is the reason I think our films aren’t taken seriously”. [Link]

Others point not to quality but to the lack of an adequate marketing budget (thanks Anil). The producer of The Departed had this advice:

… the financers who fund Bollywood movies must spend double or triple of the production costs they are currently spending just in marketing efforts and use it to promote the beauty of Indian cinema to a mainstream audience. As far as ‘The Departed’ is concerned, the promotion budget exceeded the costs of the production of the movie [Link]

Apparently the only surprise about Deepa Mehta’s Water losing out on the Best Foreign Film award last night was that the eventual winner wasn’t Pan’s Labyrinth, the consensus favorite, but rather The Lives of Others, by an impossibly tall German director with an impossibly aristocratic Prussian name. So there’s little gnashing of teeth or rending of garments in the Indian press today, simply matter-of-fact recognition that “India’s Oscar jinx” carries on. It’s also apparently a known fact (I never get to the movies, so I’m just repeating what I read) that the entire field for the foreign-film award was extremely strong. So no injustice here any way you cut it.

However, I am rather exercised at the Monday morning snub from the newspaper round-ups of red carpet fashion, which roundly ignore the gorgeous heirloom gold-threaded Banarasi sari in which Mehta graced the ceremony. Los Angeles Times, New York Times — no one paid the slightest notice, positive or negative, to the passage across the red carpet of the Water crew. Even my mellow Hank Stuever in the Washington Post — political, worldly, and queer as the proverbial three-dollar bill — ignored the desi contingent, his confessed ogling of Ryan Gosling affording John Abraham no residual love.

Oh well. Perhaps it’s all for the best that our peoples passed by under the radar, considering the standard-issue snark that’s become de rigueur in such coverage. Or perhaps coverage was the point — body coverage, that is: with so much exposed bosom and leg to take in — let alone Jack Nicholson’s creepily depilated dome — those who took cover in dignified, discreet outfits necessarily condemned themselves to oblivion in the morning news.

Deepa could have joined the flesh parade, had she wanted to match up against Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren in the “do they still got it?” division, a bit of a rigged fixture for a director against two actresses. The dresses were there for the wearing, but the sista had a much better plan:

They must have been throwing clothes at Mehta once the nominations were announced.

“Yes, they were,” she admits. “Chanel, Armani, Prada etc. … approached me. `No, thank you. I’m wearing my mother’s sari.’ For one thing, I’ll never wear a dress in my life: I’m more blue jeans and cargo pants. It was just a question of what sari.”

Her mother’s sari was part of her trousseau.

“My paternal grandmother gave it to my mom when she got married,” she recalls. “It’s gold but because it is so old (from the ’40s), it’s burnished. It’s very subtle. The gold thread is a weave not done anymore. It’s gorgeous and it’s personal. It’s Mom’s.

“And Bulgari wanted to do my jewellery. But I’ll wear my antique Indian jewellery because it goes with the sari.”

Read the full, friendly feature from the Toronto Star here. As for the Oscars, if you’re feeling the pain of desi exclusion, the Economic Times offers you here a kind of consolation.

We’ve all seen a movie and been inspired to change our lives. Usually, with me, that impulse lasts around as long as it takes me to get home and then I forget or move on. However, in Bharat Gheewala’s case [I can’t make that name up - what could be a better name than that?], he plans to act on this impulse.

Gheewala’s inspiration came from an unlikely place — the movie “The Last King of Scotland” which should earn Forest Whitaker an Oscar tonight. Watching the movie reminded Gheewala of his own experiences in Uganda over 30 years ago:

“It was a case of leaving the kitchen and the bathroom and all our belongings and just getting out,” he said. “At first no one knew if Amin had meant what he said. But when it became clear that he had there was real panic… “In the end most of us left with nothing. People knew Amin … was a killer and would carry out his threats if we did not obey him…” [Link]

Interestingly enough, it also made Gheewala, now a successful businessman in the UK, feel he should do something to help Uganda:

“There is a saying that when you prosper you should give something back to the land of your birth, the land that created you as a person and that’s what I want to do.” [Link]

Gheewala says he now wants to build a hydroelectric plant to generate electricity in the south of Uganda, and create a lasting legacy for his family. I can’t tell if he’s serious or not, or if this is all clever PR, but I thought, on Oscar night, it would be nice to spotlight somebody who at least claims to have been inspired by the silver screen.

Oh no. Hot on the heels of Amrita’s most excellent rant on her visit to the “Gateway of India” themed event at New York’s ABC Carpet & Home, and the subsequent deployment on the same thread of the neologism “Ho-rientalists,” here comes, via the SAJA mailing list, a new development that brings it all together more beautifully than one could have dreamed for. It turns out that if you visit the ABC show, which runs til March 14, you can enter to win one of “Six Unique Travel Experiences” being offered by the Taj Hotels group in conjunction with a desi-owned New York travel agency called Our Personal Guest, and known as Tattva Tours.

Tattva? The term the brochure uses to translate this rather complex mystical concept is essence — as in, the essence of India. The press release explains:

Each 10-day tour explores a distinctive cultural perspective of India; some tours also offer a choice of Northern or Southern India itineraries. They are designed to bring out the essence of an Indian experience and are named after the elements that, according to Eastern philosophy, form the basis of all existence.

For details may I direct you to the tour brochure, which is a marvel of — shit, every single last damn cliché you could possibly round up about the mysterious, mystical, spiritual, romantic, esoteric, and not least, luxurious Orient, all set against glowing ochres and purples and yellows and labeled in the requisite faux-Devanagari script. It offers conceptual summaries of the six tours, which include Agni (“The delicacies by Indian fire - It’s not what you taste, it’s what you spice your memory with”), Vaayu (“A flight of fancy with Indian royalty - It’s not how you fly, it’s how high you soar”), Bhoomi (“The earthy splendour of Indian crafts - It’s not what you touch, it’s how it caresses you within”), Aakash, Jal, and Kham.

If we start quoting the descriptive copy for each of these tours we’ll never get out of here, so let me just offer one editorial gem:

Vaayu - Wind
Knowing no bounds, the royalty of India knew no limits when it came to revelry and celebrations. Without India’s royalty, pink would not have become the navy blue of India.

Now hold on a second. This might sound like gibberish to you, but then again, chances are you just aren’t sophisticated enough to understand it. After all, Our Personal Guest is aimed at a very specific type of client, the OPG Traveler:

Alright, macacas. We don’t want you to get the wrong idea. It’s only because we’ve all been crazy busy lately that we haven’t gotten to this one yet. We certainly don’t want you to think that we here at the Mutiny consider ourselves too high-brow(n) to address the strange case of Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, a.k.a. the “meth doctor” who has found himself in the limelight due to his involvement in the now-ended life of Anna Nicole Smith.

Question One: Is that T-shirt for real, or is it Photoshopped? Either way it’s a remarkable image. Almost as remarkable as the image the gossip sites had of the brother sans shirt, apparently launching into woozy canoodle with Ms. Smith on a couch in a club before some other sycophant shoves a hand on the camera lens. Almost as remarkable as that of the brother astride a West Hollywood Gay Pride Parade “float” — actually a black Saab convertible — gazing fondly down at Ms. Smith while she — oh, just click the link. (I have absolutely no idea whether it’s SFW or NSFW, by the way. I can’t gauge these things anymore.)

One of my Sepia colleagues commented to me that the brewing controversy over Dr. Kapoor, who is now under investigation by the California medical board for his alleged role in supplying Ms. Smith with the alleged pharmaceutical products that are alleged to have contributed to her demise (I think we’re safe with that phrasing), is actually good for the race, in that no one has commented on Kapoor’s ethnicity, leaving his incompetence and general gross-ness to speak for itself without racial qualifiers — he is being judged, if you will, not on the color of his skin but on the content of his character. Well, my co-Mutineer didn’t actually phrase it that way; I’m embellishing, but it’s still his basic point. Which means: Yay! Desis are now so normalized into the field of medicine that they are expected to be insane, incompetent, quacks at no greater or lesser rate than found in the general medical population.

The gossip sites also inform us (caution: clothed but scary picture) that Dr. Kapoor advertised at some point for a position (chick pea, are you listening?) in which he describes one of his practice’s specialties as Entertainment Medicine. This is, apparently, a hitherto-unknown field. He also does travel immunizations and (ahem) “several national and international clinical pharmaceutical trials.” I don’t know about Entertainment Medicine, but when it comes to Medicine Entertainment, this brother’s gotta be a shoo-in for the Oscar.

A friend emailed me over the weekend, notifying me that desi stand-up comedian Hari Kondabolu was going to appear to on Jimmy Kimmel on Monday, February 19. Unfortunately, I was out of town and didn’t get to check my email in time (drat!) so I missed the whole thing. And I’ve been scouring the internet since then, trying to find the clip for this post but I have yet to find it. (If anyone can point me to it, I’ll upload it here.)

UPDATE: My friend emailed Hari and asked him for the clip, and he was nice enough to send it to her. Here you go. I love it!

Two stories have caught my attention in the past two days, and both deal with everyone’s favorite subject: dating! Or rather, I should say the stories are more about the lack of suitable mating options that has resulted from the intersection of two topics we blog about quite often on SM: 1) the growing new economies of India and China; and 2) the messed up sex ratio resulting from female foeticide and infanticide.

Yesterday, PRI’s Marketplace sent a reporter in to the heart of “Parent’s Matchmaker’s Corner” in Shanghai. The corner is basically a trading floor where worried Chinese parents gather to trade biodata on their late-twentysomething children, mostly without the knowledge of said children. The story was set in Shanghai but it might as well have been Delhi, as almost identical market forces are at work. Among the many great insights (some humorous) in the radio story (please listen) are the following:

1) Chinese A-list men date B-list women because they don’t want someone as smart as them. They want a trophy wife.

2) Many Chinese A-list men go abroad to seek their fortune, thus restricting supply.

3) Chinese A-list women get screwed because they are in high demand (since there is an overall shortage of women), but only have B and C-list men to choose from.

4) A-list women throw themselves into work and/or fool around waiting for an A-list man that might never materialize.

5) B and C-list men grow increasingly bitter and frustrated because all the B and C-list women have traded up and the A-list women only want them for their bods.

This chain of events is set into motion for two reasons: 1) there is a skewed sex ratio; and 2) in the “new” economies you have as many or more educated women as men. Again, everything above seems to apply to India as well. You’ll also note that in America reason #2 is already applicable, but what saves us from the same spiral is that we don’t perform sex selection.

I have a number of brown friends who are staunch, one might even say devout, atheists but you’d never know it because they are very private about their beliefs. I find this a bit perplexing because they are quite outspoken on most other personal and political matters, but when it comes to matters of religion and God, these desi atheists (==> daytheists) are still in the closet because of the social costs involved in exposing themselves.

Stamp celebrating the founder of India’s Atheist Center

Very Favorable: 7%
Mostly Favorable: 27%
Mostly Unfavorable: 19%
Very Unfavorable: 33% [Link]

That’s even more negative than American opinions about Muslims, both amongst born-again Christians and amongst non-Chiristians! In fact, more Americans would be willing to vote for a gay candidate than an atheist:

Atheists “are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public,” … In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, Americans said they believed in God by a margin of 92 to 6 … and only 37 percent said they’d be willing to vote for an atheist for president. (That’s down from 49 percent in a 1999 Gallup poll—which also found that more Americans would vote for a homosexual than an atheist.)… [Link]

Surprisingly, tolerance for atheism might be higher on the desi side. While I don’t have comparable poll numbers, atheism has a long history within India as a philosophical movement, going back to 600 BC:

Carvaka, an atheistic school of Indian philosophy, traces its origins to 600 BCE. It was a hedonistic school of thought, advocating that there is no afterlife. Carvaka philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1400 CE. [Link]

[Amartya Sen says:] “Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature than exists in any other classical language. Even within the Hindu tradition, there are many people who were atheist.” [Link]

In fact, some prominent Hindutva figures are actually atheists:

Well-known personality, Veer Savarkar, who was president of Hindu Mahasabha, was an atheist. He is credited for developing a Hindu nationalist political ideology he termed as Hindutva (Hinduness).

Bal Thackeray, the founder and president of the Shiv Sena, has publicly proclaimed himself an atheist after the death of his wife.[Link]

Sonny Suchdev, of the band Outernational, has a nice personal essay up at RaceWire, the blog for the magazine Colorlines (thanks, Dave).

It’s a story describing an experience that many Sikh guys have had — having the dastaar (or pagri, or turban) pulled off as someone’s idea of a joke:

I’m riding the F train like usual in Brooklyn when dozens of kids – perhaps in junior high – get in my subway car on their way home from school. The train is bustling with adolescent energy.

As the train stops at 4th Avenue, I hear a boy yell “Give me that!” as he and his friends run out the train door. The next thing I realize, my dastar has been yanked completely off my head. My uncovered joora dangles, and I am in complete and utter shock. Everyone on the train is staring at me. Other kids from the school are both laughing and shaking their heads in disbelief. Not knowing how to react, I stand up quickly, look out the doors of the train car and see a group of young boys of color running down the stairs. Startled and confused, I pick it up my dastar from the grimy platform and get back in the train. (link)

The part that I found most thought-provoking was the following:

I get off at Smith and 9th Street with my dirty dastar in my hands, not knowing what to do. My eyes fill with tears immediately. I feel naked and exposed, so small, so humiliated, and so so alone… . I get to a corner of the platform and break down in despair, remembering fifth grade vividly, feeling so angry and exhausted from living in this country. The twenty something years of this shit is going through me at once – the slurs, the obnoxious stares, the go back to your countries, the threats, the towel/rag/tomato/condom/tumor heads, all of it. But somehow pulling off my turban hurts more than anything. Maybe it’s the symbolism of my identity wrapped up in this one piece of cloth that, like my brown skin, I wear everyday.(link)

Skin is a good metaphor in one sense, though the sense of shame entailed in this type of experience is actually more like having a private part of your body exposed — in other words, it’s like being forcibly disrobed. Part of what makes it complicated is the fact that the perpetrators generally don’t know the symbolism of the turban, though they definitely know that what they are doing is going to result in humiliation. But maybe the sense of hurt Sonny is talking about is not about symbolism or Sikh theology, but about the more contemporary concept of “identity”: this turban, irrespective of why I wear it, is who I am. It’s what I wear every day; it’s what makes me, me. It’s about having that sense of self dismantled and disrespected for no apparent reason — for someone’s idea of a joke.

I think this story, while definitely unique in some ways to the Sikh experience, is an experience that other people who are visibly marked as different (either for ethno/religious reasons or for any other reason) can also identify with. Also, I wonder if being vulnerable in this way is at least partially analogous to the way the threat of sexual harassment can affect women. (Note the phrase “partially analogous” — as opposed to “exactly similar”)

Absolutely zero Desi Angle (TM) here per se, but a whole heap o’ relevance for anyone who frequents the comment threads here (and if you are one of those happy souls who only reads Sepia Mutiny for the blog entries, feel free to skip this one, as I’m about to get a little parochial). But I noticed that today one of the most-emailed articles from the New York Times is an essay by Daniel Goleman on the scientific explanation for why people say, uh, intemperate things online that they would rarely say — or at least say the same way — in person. So if you’ve ever wondered what it is that causes folks on discussion boards to insult each other, call each other idiots or worse, flagrantly mis-characterize each other’s points in order to drive home some strident and ill-conceived argument of their own, and generally stink up the joint — and if you’ve perhaps caught yourself doing so, whether here on in any other online exchange — you need look no further for your answer than your orbitofrontal cortex. (I trust that one of y’all medical/scientific macacas can explain the details to the rest of us, or indeed, critique the article — politely, natch.)

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.

This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track. (…)

Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.

But wait, what about :) and :P and ;) ???

True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The e-mail equivalent of a mood ring, they surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the printed words in an e-mail message, taking them the wrong way.

And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail.

TWA - Typing While Agitated. Never happens to me. No, sir. I keeps cool calm and collected. But just in case…

[Cue crabby uncle voice] The crazy things that kids do these days! They’re glued to their mobile handsets. They eat, sleep, and even go to the bathroom while jabbering away. Why, just the other day, a Pakistani man in Italy even got married over the phone:

In Milan, the man told a court that he feared losing his job in Italy if he had flown to Pakistan to get married. Instead, he got married over the phone and had an official Pakistani marriage certificate to prove it. He even showed the court a video of relatives celebrating the wedding - without the happy couple.

The groom is legally resident in Italy and had won the approval of the local police chief for his plans to marry over the phone and then bring his bride to his new hometown in northern Italy… All that mattered, the judge said, was that a telephone wedding was recognised by law in the two spouses’ home country. [Link]

Of course, Italian immigration wasn’t too happy about it, but the judge had no problem with the idea. And who would expect less from a judge in the city of … Milan.

Is this idea so strange? If you can get divorced via text message [Exhibit A, Exhibit B*] , and if you can (ahem) perform “marital activities” over the phone [topic NSFW, but link OK], then why not get married over the phone too? I have friends whose entire LDRs seem to be over the phone these days anyway, so why not include the wedding as well?

Before you think that this is just modern technology run amuck, there was actually a similar event close to 160 years ago, on the “Victorian Internet” i.e. the telegraph:

… with the bride in Boston and the groom in New York… the bride’s father had sent the young groom away for being unworthy to marry his daughter, but on a stop-over on his way to England, he managed to get a magistrate and telegraph operator to arrange the wedding. The marriage was deemed to be legally binding. [Link]

There truly is nothing new under the sun.

*Yes, I know in K-Fed’s case he was just being informed not talaqed, but I couldn’t resist

It’s difficult to know what to say sometimes after terrorist attacks like the recent bombing of the Samjhauta Express. 68 innocent people lost their lives — and for what? If it turns out to be an attack planned by Kashmiri militants or other Islamists, this kind of attack seems particularly bizarre, as it appears that the majority of the people who died were in fact Pakistanis. (If another motive or ideological agenda was behind the attack, it’s not as if it would be any better.) And needless to say, if this follows the pattern of some other recent terrorist attacks in India, it’s entirely possible — likely, even — that weeks will go by without any satisfactory answers appearing. (I’m perfectly happy to be proven wrong if this turns out not to be true.)

Here are some of the issues I’ve seen people discussing with regards to this attack:

• At Outlook, there is an interesting article that describes in depth the general lack of security on the Samjhauta Express train. Hopefully, both governments are going to seriously revamp this.
  
• A big question that people are asking is, were the doors locked from the inside, preventing people who survived the original explosions from escaping the two burning cars? Some witnesses have claimed they were, but India has denied it. At Bharat-Rakshak, however, I came across a commenter who has a good explanation for why this might have been done:

  In north India, when travelling overight, train compartments are usually locked from inside to prevent entry of people who do not have reservations in that compartment. The TT opens them at stations to allow entry only the passengers that belong to that compartment.
  
  With intense heat, the locked door latches must have jammed. It is difficult to open these latches even otherwise. Women and kids have to ask other passengers to help then open the door.
  
  The windows in trains are barred to prevent ‘chain snatching’ and other types of burglaries. (link)

  Those sound like good reasons, but I hope after this tragedy officials are thinking about possible failsafe mechanisms, so nothing like this happens again.
  
• Sketches have been released of the suspects. They were apparently speaking the “local Hindi language.” That doesn’t tell us much, however.
  
• What was the explosive used? The bombs are being described as IEDs with kerosene and other “low intensity” fuels — in other words, not RDX or other material obtained through transnational networks. These sound like materials that are very easily available, but still incredibly deadly for people in a confined space. A witness at the BBC mentions that the explosions did not force the conductor to stop the train right away — indeed, he may not have known about them until several minutes after the fires started.

Two Sundays ago, the PBS program, Religion and Ethics, decided to ask the question: “Why are Hinduism and Buddhism capturing the attention of business and management circles?”

The show profiled Professor Srikumar S. Rao, of the enormously popular Columbia University class Creativity and Personal Mastery, and Gautam Jain, of the Vedanta Cultural Foundation.

So the answer to the PBS question? The usual hodgepodge: happiness is elusive, the material world is illusory, one must not be possessed by one’s possessions… Since the 80s proved to business people that greed is not necessarily good, satisfying, or even lucrative in the long run, people are searching for another peg to hang a slogan upon.

I have a reflexive gag reaction to anything that smells of Deepak Chopra and the “pot of gold at the end of the spiritual rainbow” school of thought. While Prof. Rao and Gautamji came across as sincere, thoughtful and genuine (at least in the 5 mins alloted to each), I wonder if, despite their best efforts to explode the If/Then model of happiness, their students listen selectively. After all, these are people willing to pay $1,000 over the cost of the class to listen to Prof. Rao. His website, Are You Ready to Succeed? opens with this passage:

Life is short. And uncertain. It is like a drop of water skittering around on a lotus leaf. You never know when it will drop off the edge and disappear. So each day is far too precious to waste. And each day that you are not radiantly alive and brimming with cheer is a day wasted.

Which, frankly, leaves me lost (lotus, skittering, radiant cheer -what?) and slightly thirsty.

Our site administrator Paul tips us off to an article over at the BBC today that highlights a unique new program launched by the government of India:

The Indian government is planning to set up a network of cradles around the country where parents can leave unwanted baby girls.

The minister for women and child development, Renuka Chowdhury, told BBC News the cradles would be “everywhere”.

It is the latest initiative to try to wipe out the practice of female foeticide and female infanticide. [Link]

In my opinion anything that will help mitigate the foeticide and infanticide scourge is a good thing, but the imagery of little cradles set up around the country is kind of bittersweet.

“We will have cradles strategically placed all over the place so that people who don’t want their babies can leave them there,” Ms Chowdhury told the BBC News website.

The cradles could be in places as diverse as the local tax collector’s office, or where local councils meet.

Ms Chowdhury said parents would be able to leave their babies secretly. The important thing was to save their lives…

“They will be collected and put into homes,” she said. “There are plenty of existing homes and we will be adding some more also…” [Link]

Apparently there is actually a precedent for this type of program (in Japan):

The drop-off at Jikei Hospital in southern Japan will consist of a small window in an outside wall, which opens on to an incubator bed, officials say.

Once a baby has been placed inside, an alarm bell will alert staff. [Link]

I bring to your attention two pictures taken yesterday near Ahmedabad, Gujarat. It’s a striking reminder as to the source of the deliciousness of Indian cuisine:

“Must remember to not touch my eyes…must remember to not touch my eyes…

And in related news:

India’s Bhut Jolokia chilli has been confirmed as the world’s hottest pepper by The Guinness Book of Records, a US researcher said.

Bhut Jolokia comes in at 1,001,304 Scoville heat units, a measure of hotness for a chilli. It is nearly twice as hot as Red Savina, the variety it replaces as the hottest. By comparison, an average jalapeno measures at about 10,000.

Paul Bosland, a regents professor at New Mexico State University, recalls taking a bite of the chilli pepper and feeling like he was breathing fire. He gulped down a soda, thinking, ”That chilli has got to be some kind of record.” [Link]

The current Atlantic Monthly has what I find to be a brilliant and informative article titled, “They Won’t Know What Hit Them.” Anyone who digs the intricacies of politics should read it for some of the insights it provides into how politics works in this age of campaign finance reform. The article focuses on how a small group of wealthy gay donors are working “stealthily” behind the scenes to make our country more “Gay-friendly.” On its surface this doesn’t have anything to do with South Asian Americans (unless they are gay), but by the time I get to the end you’ll see that it could have everything to do with us.

A tough loss can be hard to swallow, and plenty of defeated politicians have been known to grumble about sinister conspiracies. When they are rising stars like Danny Carroll, the Republican speaker pro tempore of Iowa’s House of Representatives, and the loss is unexpected, the urge to blame unseen forces can be even stronger—and in Carroll’s case, it would have the additional distinction of being justified. Carroll was among the dozens of targets of a group of rich gay philanthropists who quietly joined forces last year, under the leadership of a reclusive Colorado technology mogul, to counter the tide of antigay politics in America that has generated, among other things, a succession of state ballot initiatives banning gay marriage. Carroll had sponsored such a bill in Iowa and guided it to passage in the state House of Representatives, the first step toward getting it on the ballot…

Over the summer, Carroll’s opponent started receiving checks from across the country—significant sums for a statehouse race, though none so large as to arouse suspicion (the gifts topped out at $1,000). Because they came from individuals and not from organizations, nothing identified the money as being “gay,” or even coordinated. Only a very astute political operative would have spotted the unusual number of out-of-state donors and pondered their interest in an obscure midwestern race. And only someone truly versed in the world of gay causes would have noticed a $1,000 contribution from Denver, Colorado, and been aware that its source, Tim Gill, is the country’s biggest gay donor, and the nexus of an aggressive new force in national politics.

Carroll certainly didn’t catch on until I called him after the election, in which Democrats took control of both legislative chambers, as well as Carroll’s seat and four of the five others targeted by Gill and his allies. [Link]

As I read this article it got me thinking about some of the races and candidates that we’ve highlighted on SM in the past. Remember Durbin, Abraham, and Webb? I think in the case of Macaca-Gate, South Asian money did have some impact on the race. That effort had no real organization behind it, however. I also realize that unlike the gay community (to an extent), South Asian Americans aren’t necessarily a voting block, but are rather voting “icebergs” (a term I like to forward). Still, some of the ideas that Gill has put into practice could work very well for other groups.

Bloggers can’t presume objectivity, so despite the fact that I don’t subscribe (only get old-school network TV), I’m frankly quite dismayed by the news that MTVWorld has closed shop. I know some people who work(ed) at MTV Desi, and appeared on a show that might never air, so perhaps my sentiments are self-serving. But an MTV desi producer emailed this rather heartbreaking note to me today:

This is just really tough for all of us who work to the bone on making something progressive and representative of our communities. I’ve been pretty broken up.

I feel truly truly sad…[and would like] people to understand the challenges of creating a 24 hour channel. The reason we repeat so much is because there are fucking four of us working our asses to the bone to get content up. We are growing. We are a start up— give us a chance!!!

It takes time— and we barely cleared a year and we have supported so many many artists and every single one of them has walked out of our studio feeling proud, happy, accomplished, important…[there is] a need for us to get out there… [to represent] what we stand for and how much WE CARE!!

SepiaMutiny blogged about MTVdesi from its inception, as the first video dropped, anchors were selected, desi artists aired their first videos. We even blogged about how MTV desi covered the Pakistan earthquake (internet writing about liquid television…does that count as meta commentary or wankery?)

In the we-watch-so-you-don’t have-to category, I thought it would be nice to provide an update or two on our non-Bollywood desi brethren continuing to make it in the world of reality television. We blogged previously about the Singing Malakars, and unlike Abhi, I have been known to watch American Idol and other reality fare, especially when they feature South Asians. (For the record, I think it is way better than toilet water.) In this weeks installment of American Idol, we saw saw the splitting of the Malakar siblings, as Simon, Paula, and Randy decided to send Shyamali home, but advance Sanjaya all the way through to the final 24 (link). I thought Sanjaya’s rendition of “Some Kind Of Wonderful,” was pretty good, and it was great to see a desi make it through to the actual competition. Even if he doesn’t win, as long as Sanjaya doesn’t give a performance like like this one from the U.K.’s Pop Idol (definitely click on the link—it is hilarious), he will be a winner in my book. You can follow Sanjaya’s progress, here and on American Idol which airs Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s on Fox.

I make no secret of the fact that I am extremely annoyed by what I feel is the waayyyyyy too early ‘08 Presidential campaigning going on and the hype surrounding many of the candidates. Instead of acting to implement the will of the people (which seems clear) it feels like there are a bunch of Presidential hopefuls out there using “non-binding resolutions” as a means to define their candidacy in relation to their opponents. Isn’t the point of lawmakers to enact binding resolutions? I make non-binding resolutions at SM all the time but most people just ignore them.

Part of the reason I wanted to help launch a blog like SM was to cover the ‘08 elections from a South Asian perspective. I’d like to make sure that we aren’t simply following politics like it’s a sport but rather keeping an eye on the issues that matter. I’m hoping also that those of you that may get involved with campaigns will feed us information about your experience. That experience is a large part of the South Asian perspective I want to capture here.

As always, SM does not endorse any candidates but will sniff out the desi angle on a story. And so, in February of 2006, a full 22 months before the next Presidential election, I bring you news of South Asians for Obama (SAFO). Their first fundraising event will be held Thursday, March 1 in D.C. (details will soon be on our EVENTS PAGE):

South Asians for Obama (SAFO) is a grassroots movement to unite the South Asian American community around Barack Obama’s vision for our country’s future. CLICK HERE to contribute to Senator Obama on behalf of the South Asian American community. [Link]

My political operatives (what? I could have operatives. You don’t know) also tell me that some of the former leadership of South Asian’s For Kerry in 2004 will soon be starting something like a “South Asians for Hillary.”

In order to be fair and balanced I thought I’d link to South Asians for Rudy, or McCain, or Mitt but I wasn’t able to find such fundraising sites. I would be forever grateful to anyone that could alert me to such a development though. I also love posting pictures of candidates hugging South Asians (or making dosas with them).

I kind of just miss the good old days when people threw their hat into the ring only 11 months before the election. I mean, there are plenty of other things to do until election day. Now it seems that if you don’t lock up donors and have money in the bank almost two years out, it’s all over. I’m sure everyone sees where this is headed. In the future we will have people announce on Nov. 3rd.

Now where can I get me that button as a keepsake?

Back in 2005, bloggers at Sepia Mutiny (and me, on my own small blog) announced with some excitement the advent of MTV Desi, a channel geared to NRIs and Second Gen South Asian youth. Now there are news reports that MTV Desi is getting axed, along with its sister diasporic channels MTV Chi and MTV K, as Viacom is undergoing a restructuring. Hollywood Reporter has an MTV executive making the following statement:

“Unfortunately, the premium distribution model for MTV World proved more challenging than we anticipated in this competitive environment,” the company said. “As a result, MTV has decided to shut down its linear MTV World operation. However, we remain steadfast in superserving multicultural youth, and we are continuing to investigate ways to integrate the MTV Desi, Chi and K brands online and on our other screens.” (link)

Well, duh, if it’s only available via Satellite TV, you can bet that “Cheap Ass Desis” (to rip off a former SM commenter’s moniker) aren’t about to shell out a hefty monthly fee for it. I believe I’m the only blogger here who actually subscribes to MTV Desi — and it’s only because my in-laws came to stay with us for a few months, and the channel came packaged with the channels they really wanted — Star One, Star Plus, Star News, and NDTV. Still, I’ve actually spent some hours watching the channel, so maybe I’m the best person to do a little mini-elegy. (By the way, it’s worth noting that the channel is still on the air as of today.)

First, the positive. The best thing I ever saw on MTV Desi was the following inspired rant by Parag Khanna.

There are some statements he makes that miss the mark (India isn’t the poorest country in the world by the indices I’ve seen), but I appreciate the energy. Instead of being the embarrassed, cautious ABCD — do we really know enough about India to comment on corruption? shouldn’t we stay “positive”? — he’s taking a strong stance. (Parag Khanna might make a good blogger.) If MTV Desi is really dead, it’s too bad we’ll get less stuff like this.

Since I’m a bleeding heart, listening to my friends complain about how much last night cost them made me think about the costs that are born by smaller folk than me. In response to my post about how India has become a major flower exporter and how an Indian multinational is poised to become the largest rose exporter in the world, Anantha pointed out the dark side of this business, namely accusations of the use of child labour:

Malur, the little-known rose capital on the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu border, which caters to a large domestic and export market, engages more than 1,000 female children in this chain of rose production, right from rose plucking to packaging, according to John Devaraj, a film maker and a child rights activist… [Link]

While I question some of the claims made (“These girls are swift in their work and can pluck upto even 10,000 roses per day…” [Link]), the accusation is quite plausible on its face.

If present, the use of child labor is even more troubling when you consider the fact that flower growing involves large quantities of fertilizer and pesticides, thus exposing children to noxious chemicals. Even without that, though, roses have thorns, something that’s easy to forget when you only have to deal with the cellophane wrapped versions, so this is hardly light labor.

Horticulture, however, comes out smelling like roses in comparison to the high end of the romance market, namely diamonds. As you all know, India is a dominant force in the bulk diamond market:

India’s diamond industry is the fastest growing in the world, employing more than a million people and turning over some $8bn a year. [Link]

It’s not surprising that some diamond merchants are willing to cut corners when it comes to the source of the gems:

‘These stones are from Africa,’ he said, holding up two knuckle-sized murky brown diamonds. ‘We can’t always tell where they are from, but they aren’t legitimate. But here business is done with cash and no questions.’…

‘Look at this diamond,’ Shah said. ‘It’s not small, but is easy to smuggle. What can be done to stop that being smuggled to India? I will get a buyer, an agent for a polisher, who will give me a good price, and then sell it out of a reputable firm for export. There is no way it can ever be traced…’

The stones brought in by dhows and fishing boats through the shallow waters of Gujarat’s ungovernable west coast make a laughing stock of attempts to stem the global flow of blood diamonds. [Link]

Bizarre and strange were the words that came to mind when I first started reading this article…

Wendy Duncan and her husband Brian are white. Nineteen months ago, the Lincolnshire housewife gave birth to a beautiful, healthy, Indian daughter. Freya, brown-skinned and dark-eyed, is not a medical miracle after a long and fruitless quest through IVF and adoption, but the product of a booming industry in India that is offering embryos for adoption.

Embryo adoption was the culmination of an 18-year journey for the Duncans during which their attempts to become parents were frustrated by nature and bureaucracy. Being white and already having a mixed-race child (from Mrs Duncan’s previous relationship) meant that they failed the criteria for a normal adoption.

IVF was unsuccessful and expensive for a family relying on Mr Duncan’s income as a lorry driver. The older Mrs Duncan got, the less the chance there was of any fertility treatment working. Their options were running out until they stumbled upon a website for the Bombay clinic. It was an easy choice.

Straight from the title, “Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against India’s Untouchables,” you know that the new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) out today is pulling no punches when it comes to qualifying the extent and seriousness of anti-Dalit discrimination in India today. The comparison with apartheid gained significant political cover two months ago when the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, drew the link in public remarks at a conference in Delhi. Here’s the prime minister:

Singh said: “Dalits have faced a unique discrimination in our society that is fundamentally different from the problems of minority groups in general. The only parallel to the practice of untouchability is apartheid,” he said. “Untouchability is not just social discrimination, it is a blot on humanity,” Singh said.

Calling for a “political, social, cultural and intellectual battle,” against such discrimination, the PM noted that constitutional and administrative measures alone are not sufficient. “Our government is deeply and sincerely committed to the equality of all sections of our society and will take all necessary steps to help in the social, educational and economic empowerment of Dalits. This is our solemn commitment,” Singh said.

Of course the gap between legal remediation and actual practice has been precisely the problem for 57 years, since the Constitution in 1950 outlawed untouchability in all its forms, with further legislation added over the years. The continuing discrimination against Dalits also violates the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, to which India is a signatory, as the convention covers not just what its title narrowly suggests but in fact “race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin.” At any rate, this gap between theory in practice is well known, and the problem has always been to end the actual practices of discrimination, violence, and humiliation that Dalits encounter across India to degrees that perhaps (probably) vary by region and locality but are never, ever trivial.

Consider a few choice quotes from the report’s summary (you can download it or read the whole report online here):

Meet Joseph Cho, all Asian-American boy. Cho went to Yale undergrad, enlisted in the Army after 9/11, served 3 years and was given a honorable discharge [Link]. Now 31, Joe Cho is a law student at Penn. Thus far he sounds like the kind of good Asian kid that even the most xenophobic auntie and uncle would love to have over for tea. “He’s a good influence,” they might say.

However, earlier this month something went … wonky. Cho had a beef with some neighbors. That’s normal — I don’t like my next door neighbor either, he plays his shoot ‘em up video games late at night and disturbs my sleep. Usual apartment building stuff.

Cho’s beef, however, was a bit different from mine. He believed his neighbors, two desi men, were actually terrorists and decided to do something about it.

Police said Cho,… suspected the neighbors - two Indian men studying biomedical engineering at Drexel University - of being spies. On Wednesday afternoon, he sought to confront them. When no one answered his knock on their door, he shot the lock off with his Glock pistol, walked inside, and eventually left. [Link]

Gulp! His lawyer says his client was off his rocker:

His lawyer, Peter Bowers, said the attack on the men he believed were terrorists … “appears to have been a mental health or emotional issue…” Cho, meanwhile, was described as an “outstanding young man,” Bowers said. “It’s really an unfortunate incident…” [Link]

You know, the words tourism and terrorism sound so much alike, it’s an easy mistake to make. It could happen to anybody, really.

The university provost said:

“the student has been temporarily suspended from the law school. The matter will be reported to the Law School’s Committee on Student Conduct and Responsibility for its consideration…” [Link]

I suppose that’s a good first step. I wonder what you have to do to get kicked out of law school.

Me? I wonder if he’s been watching too much 24.

Update 1: See comment #20 by somebody who knows him

Update 2: It was racial, at least in part:

Walker said the Penn student, a Korean American, accosted the Drexel students yesterday morning as all were leaving the building, … When the Drexel students told the Penn student that they planned to return to India after their studies, the Penn student accused them of being spies, Walker said. [Link]

One of the students was actually in the apartment at the time:

… around noon, the Penn student “decided to engage in more conversation” and banged on the Drexel students’ door, Walker said. When he got no answer, he got his 9mm Glock handgun and emptied it into the lock, police said. Then he stepped inside, looked around, and left the building. Unbeknownst to the assailant, one of the Drexel students was cringing in his bedroom about 25 feet from the door. [Link]

Another neighbor called 911, and officers found the 22-year-old Drexel student still cowering inside the apartment, said police. [Link]

Somebody on a bulletin board who claims to be a fellow law student said:

I think this guy has been involved in at least one other racially charged incident at the law school recently. [Link]

And the final indignity — the mere mention of terrorism has meant that police anti-terrorism officers have been notified:

Police said … that investigators will notify police terrorism officials about the reason behind the shooting. [Link]

Falak is the name of a Pakistani-Canadian rock band out of Toronto. You can check out their Myspace page to listen to some of their tunes and read their blog entries. Searching the name “Falak” on Youtube will turn up a bunch of clips of their music videos and live performances. At face they sound like a typical hard rock band destined to obscurity. However, MTV Pakistan recently banned them…but not before they had already been airing their video over there for a while (since December).

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

So….just wanted to let you all know…that FALAK’s first video is officially airing in Pakistan. It’s a bit scandalous for North American television though….so don’t really know when you can expect to see it here….maybe when these fascist pigs try exercising real freedom of speech …

In the meanwhile, remember, CNN is bullshit…. [Link]

The ban of course will generate some attention for them. Why the ban? Watch this video, titled Yadein part II:

So I ask the question to SM’s readers because I am still trying to decide. Is this art/expression, or does it lend a rock-and-roll mystique to something else…

I’m not sure what the hell is going on with the world these days. First there was a daal shortage. More recently, word has gotten out that the corn tortilla population is in decline and at serious risk:

MANY DEMOCRATS and some Republicans applauded President Bush’s State-of-the-Union proposal for a 20 percent reduction in gasoline use over the next 10 years, largely through greater reliance on ethanol.

Bush’s idea, however, is adding corn-based fuel to protests in Mexico City. Existing federal laws that mandate ethanol in U.S. gasoline have diverted trainloads of corn from America’s food supply-chain to ethanol factories. This boosted U.S. corn prices nearly 80 percent in 2006.

That’s bad enough if you buy corn on the cob for a weekend barbecue. But it’s much worse if you are a poor Mexican surviving on corn tortillas. A kilo (2.2 pounds) of tortillas recently has shot up 55 percent, from 5.5 to 8.5 pesos. Poor Mexicans are not taking this sitting down. [Link]

Look, I know that wheat tortillas are “healthier” for you and that flour tortillas are less soggy. But come on. Nothing but a hot corn tortilla smothered in enchilada sauce should be wrapped around spinach and cheese filling. Via BoingBoing we now learn that “famed” investor Vinod Khosla is going to build an ethanol plant in Georgia that will use waste wood instead of corn to produce the fuel:

We knew it was coming. Vinod Khosla has finally made a bold move to back up industry-wide speculation that cellulosic ethanol would soon emerge as the next phase in ethanol production. The surprise is that wood would be the feedstock of choice given the vast headstart of corn-based biorefineries in the country and the obvious synergy of basing corn stover conversion technologies near sugar fermentation plants.

However, the high energy potential of wood cellulose, the ready availability of cheap waste, and the search for a renaissance of forestry-based industries makes the announcement a welcome one to the “nation’s woodpile” in the southeastern states. [Link]

To put it more simply, why kill tortillas to make fuel for your car when instead you could use the scrap wood from all the post consumer waste you produce? I for one am glad that investors like Khosla have the foresight to pump money into alternative sources of fuel while big oil keeps reaping record profits from our pockets.

And before anyone accuses me of being a bad Indian, I like rotis too.

Lavina Melwani, who seems to write three-quarters of the articles in the monthly Little India, has an informative piece on desis in the convenience store industry in the current issue. It’s the first focused treatment I’ve seen of the South Asian presence in that business that provides numbers, even if some are estimates, along with anecdotal information and personal stories. A few of the facts:

• According to trade associations, 50,000 to 70,000 of the 140,000 convenience stores in the United States are owned by South Asians. South Asian owned stores do an estimated $100bn annual business.

• Over 50 percent of US 7-Elevens are owned by South Asians.

• 60 percent of South Asian owned stores are independent properties, as opposed to chain franchises - a similar pattern to the motel business, where desis began with independent properties before gradually acquiring brand-name franchises.

In addition to the National Association of Convenience Stores, several desi trade groups have sprung up: the Asian American Convenience Store Association, the Asian American Retailers Association, and the National Alliance of Trade Associations, which is based in the Ismaili community. The AACSA held its second convention in December and a third is scheduled for late May in Florida.

The article profiles a number of desi convenience store owners. It is pretty much the basic immigrant hard-work-make-good story. The risks of the profession are alluded to in passing. One point that stands out is that the convenience store business isn’t just an intermediate stop on the way up to more lucrative or prestigious activities:

[A profiled c-store owner] says the strength of the industry is in its ability to withstand economic downturns. He recalls, “When my son graduated from the University of Texas in 2000 the computer industry was booming. The first job was very good, but then in 2003 he was laid off. So he joined me in the business. The convenience store business is recession proof, because everyone needs bread and beer and lottery tickets. I always felt safe in the convenience store industry.”

Apu from The Simpsons earns a mention, and it’s a positive one:

For long, the only South Asian on TV was Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the owner of the Quik-E-Mart in the TV show The Simpsons. He is known for having worked for 96 hours straight, taken so many bullets that bullets ricochet off the bullets already lodged in his body! He is savvy, brainy and a one-man dynamo of energy. And a Ph.D to boot.

The stereotype has a sliver of truth, as hard work, family solidarity and resourcefulness are at the root of South Asian success in the C-store business. Many owners have professional degrees and include some physicians.

As a side note, the convenience store industry has at least once tried to embrace Apu. Here’s a straight-faced press release from the NACS in 2003. It’s entertaining to see how they twist and turn to explain why Apu may be good for industry image (“Apu encapsulates a number of positive traits found in the convenience store industry”) while never referring to Apu’s ethnicity.

Don’t believe uncles and aunties when they say that nobody celebrates Valentines Day in India. Not only is romance a bloomin’, but it has some help from unlikely quarters.

First, Shiv Sena is (again) offering to come to the assistance of lurv:

… hardline Hindu groups have threatened to marry off young couples meeting in public places like parks and restaurants Feb 14. [Link]

They will not manhandle or threaten the Valentines, or vandalise the greeting card shops tomorrow. “The lovers have mistaken Shiv Sainiks to be the heart-breakers. We permanently unite the hearts….” says Shiv Sena District President Gulshan Kumar.

If there is any opposition for the marriage of lovers from their family, Shiv Sainiks stand by them. But the couples should belong to Hindu religion. [Link]

The loophole in this plan is obvious though, leave your ID at home and voila! An entire town of Mary Joshuas and Jacob Abrahams out on dates! [Yes, I know the threatening to forcibly marry couples isn’t new - they did it last year as well]

This being India, mobilization is met with an apposite counter:

… two women’s groups, belonging to the Sawarna Samaj Party (SSP) and the Rashtriya Secular Manch (RSM), have decided to take on those threatening to oppose Valentine’s Day … the RSM has decided to form baton-wielding groups of women to dissuade Bajrang Dal activists from disturbing lovers Wednesday on the Valentine’s Day. These women’s wings have declared to provide the necessary security to citizens if the state government fails to do so. [Link]

I’m sure they will get a lot of calls for their service too — “Quickly! Send 4 or 5 women to the park by the IIT men’s hostel! There are couples being oppressed by the RSS Shiv Sena!” Who knew that crying wolf was a great way to meet women?

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have been counting down to Wednesday all year long, and those who wonder why so many people are buying flowers for President’s Day. I count myself in the latter camp, having been single virtually every Vday that I can remember. So I watch with amusement as many of my friends work themselves into a lather because of the intense pressure to commemorate this day with precisely the right amount and kind of conspicuous consumption.

The mingled scent of love and desperation in the air can mean only one thing for desis these days, namely speed dating followed by quirky stories from the mainstream media. Here’s a NYT article about Muslim Speed Dating Meeting:

A few years ago the organizers were forced to establish a limit of one parent per participant and bar them from the tables until the social hour because so many interfered. Parents … alternate between craning their necks to see who their adult children are meeting or horse-trading bios, photographs and telephone numbers among themselves….

Mrs. Siddique said her shy, 20-year-old daughter spent the hours leading up to the banquet crying that her father was forcing her to do something weird. “Back home in Pakistan, the families meet first,” she said. “You are not marrying the guy only, but his whole family…” [Link]

I suspect journalists are tickled by this spectacle because to them speed dating is like the bar scene, but faster. So the idea that conservative parents endorse it is weird. Parents, on the other hand, see it as a faster way to set up little tea encounters for their children, but only wholesale instead of retail. And desis love a bargain!

Desi parents (especially Muslim ones, but I’m sure there are similar scenes in other communities) do make it pretty easy to be mocked:

One panelist, Yasmeen Qadri, suggested that Muslim mothers across the continent band together in an organization called “Mothers Against Dating,” modeled on Mothers Against Drunk Driving. [Link],

So who’s right? Is speed dating/meeting a truly chaste solution to parents’ worries, or is it the first step down the slippery slope to group sex and public handholding?

Mothers trade biodatas while their children speed date

When you think about it, there are many ways in which speed dating can go horribly horribly wrong. My favorite account of a speed dating disaster comes from Rupa:

R: So…what do you like to do for fun?
Another boring dude: I play online pokers. And I watch Indian movies.
R: Do you read books?
Abd: No. I hate it when authors, y’know, try to give their OPINION. I hate it when people try and tell me how to think. So I don’t read books.
R: So you just don’t think?
Abd: Yes. [Link]

Bored out of her gourd, Rupa turns … dangerous:

Towards the middle I just stopped asking questions, because I realized I totally, absolutely, fully did not give a shit. And that was when I decided to start making stuff up. I … managed to tell someone that I had a 9-year old son (“My family is extremely supportive”), that I had a gambling problem (“After I took out that third mortgage on my condo, my parents staged an intervention. Have you ever been to that casino in Gary, Indiana? They caught it all on tape”), but my favorite was when Natasha asked someone if he would have a problem with a woman who did drugs.

ABD#3: Just once in a while, right?
N: No…it’s pretty much everyday.
ABD#3: Well…I guess it’s not a problem. But you’d stop after marriage, right?
N: No. Absolutely not. I don’t think so.
ABD#3: Well..I guess that’d be ok. [Link]

So when I stopped laughing my kundi off, I paused to wonder whether or not there was any way speed dating could work. I would think that if you only have a few minutes to make an impression, the usual conversational gambits fall flat since they all depend on being able to talk long enough to get past the obvious (what you do and where you live) to the more interesting.

So, tell us. What worked for you? What didn’t? If you wont fess up to having done this, explain what you might do that you’re sure would work if you tried it. Think of it as a public service. Or public ridicule. Either one, really

So, there was a big article in the New York Times recently (thanks, TechnophobicGeek) about how Indian TV is supposedly entering this golden age of innovative programming. Some of the shows mentioned have actually been talked about before at Sepia Mutiny, including “Galli Galli Sim Sim.” There’s also an interesting segment on a new reality show oriented to teenagers, called “Dhoom Machao Dhoom,” about four girls who want to start a band. One of them is a “returned” ABCD from New York, which makes for interesting drama when she says they should write their own songs instead of just doing Bollywood numbers…

Anyway, it’s a decent read, but it strikes me that Indian TV remains a narrow-minded backwater as long as Pakistan has Begum Nawazish Ali. Via 3 Quarks Daily, I came across a new profile at MSNBC of Pakistan’s famous celebrity drag queen and talk show host. Among other things, the Begum freely admits her “bisexuality,” though I’m not sure she means it the way we might think she means it. (Venial Sin, the former SM guest blogger, wasn’t thrilled about her performance, as you may remember: “I mean, kudos to Begum Nawazish Ali for getting to pull a tranny routine on TV, but how necessary is it to reiterate the stereotypes of a gay man as an effeminate ‘woman stuck in a male body’ or as a hijra?”)

But now comes the news that she plans to run for Pakistani Parliament:

Then Saleem dropped a bombshell. “You are the first person I am announcing this to, but I have decided to file my papers for the upcoming general elections,” he exclaimed. “I am going to run for a parliamentary seat as an independent from all over Pakistan and I am going to campaign as Begum Nawazish Ali!” The note of triumph and excitement in his voice is unmistakable.

“I want to be the voice of the youth and for all of Pakistan,” he continued. “The idea was always to break barriers and preconceived notions, of gender, identity, celebrity and politics and to bring people closer. In any case, I think Begum Nawazish Ali is the strongest woman in Pakistan!”

Whether Pakistanis agree or not, the elections at the end of the year are likely to be one of the most uproarious in recent times. (link)

Interesting — we’ll see if her political career (is she really serious?) is going to be as groundbreaking as her showbiz career has been.

There are many theories about how it is the Begum can get away with it in conservative Pakistan. She’s been careful not to be crude in the Dame Edma vein, but still — there are some serious social taboos being transgressed here. What do you think?

In case you’re wondering what the fuss is about, I might recommend this 10 minute Youtube clip of the Begum doing her thing. The jokes are corny, but the sari and make-up are exquisite.

Rick Kamdar, a senior at American University, has been expelled for calling another student a gay slur.

But there’s more to the story (reg required)…

Kamdar said the incident began when he asked a student on the quad for a light, and the student’s friend told Kamdar to “Go back to India.” Kamdar then used an anti-gay slur against the student and the two began pushing each other. The fight was quickly broken up by Public Safety.

Kamdar is appealing the decision, hoping that he will be allowed to finish his last semester or at least have the dismissal removed from his transcript.

“After three years of fighting cancer, I was only going to graduate a year late,” he said. “I would not throw [my education] away.”

Kamdar said he is planning to sue the university over the hearing.

First, it’s never ok to use a gay slur. I don’t care what the context is — even if you’re surrounded only by straight people and you say it in jest, it’s still not ok. I’m not going to defend Kamdar’s use of it, nor am I going to defend this silly excuse of his:

“The word fag is a very common word; it doesn’t always mean gay,” Kamdar said. “Did I know he was gay? No. Apparently American University has concluded that people can look gay.”

And is an expulsion really necessary? If Kamdar had committed a hate crime, or had verbally harassed a gay student for no reason, then yes, I would think that an expulsion is appropriate. But this situation is a little bit more complex. And I also have to wonder: has every person who has ever used this word at AU been expelled? I assume not. If the university wants to make an example of Kamdar, fine — sentence to him community service or put him on probation. Expulsion, on the other hand, seems pretty extreme. (And yes, I would argue that if someone were to use a racial slur in a similar situation, then an expulsion wouldn’t be warranted, either.)

I’d be interested to see how this story develops. Again, feel free to let me know if you’re more familiar with this case and/or there are details that I’m unaware of.

One of the sources of creative vitality in Third World popular cultures is the uncanny ability to seize on local or global events and use them as symbols or metaphor, or simply to re-purpose names and words from the news for the purpose of entertainment that, by virtue of this method of assembly, is never completely innocent and certainly not mindless.

Also evidenced, not coincidentally, in the best hip-hop, this instinct to appropriate the signifiers of large and possibly uncontrollable events and redeploy them in the service of local meaning results in a constant renewal process in which, as one signifier runs its course, another emerges to supplant it, bringing with it new nicknames for objects in regular use — minibuses, beer bottles, bank notes, lengths of cloth — and new jokes and new dances and new fashions.

With “Bird Flu,” her new single, your girl M.I.A. taps into this endlessly rich seam. Vaguely mysterious, unpredictable, global in scope and potentially catastrophic, the bird flu that moved across several continents in 2006 was perfect for semiotic appropriation. Especially since birds, especially poultry, in various stages of ecstasy or distress have long been inspiration for dance moves — the Funky Chicken and the Dirty Bird come to mind. So it’s a chicken stuttering across a dusty village street that sets, in the video, the rhythm for the song, and much dancing, declamation, and additional avian imagery ensues. No connection to the “real” bird flu, and yet, all the connection in the world.

It’s a cool song, but before we rush to celebrate its originality I want to share with you another Bird Flu song that actually predates homegirl’s.

The selfless cab driver who returns the valuables some schmo left in his car is an urban archetype that never seems to grow old. It’s the sort of embodiment of working-class dignity that civic and business leaders draw on to signify that for all the hubbub and ambient edginess of city life, everything (and everyone) is ultimately in its right place. And in a context where, as is the case in most large American cities, taxi workers tend to be immigrants, every instance when a cabbie can be celebrated for doing the right thing represents that much more balm with which to assuage not only class but also ethnic anxieties.

This week brought two such cases, spanning the North American continent from sea to shining sea, and the heroes in both cases are desi: Indian taxi driver Vinod Mago from Lynnwood, near Seattle, who returned a customer’s wallet with $5,950 in cash, and Bangladeshi driver Osman Chowdhury (pictured) here in New York, whose customer, a jeweler from Dallas, left a suitcase that was found to contain 31 diamond rings rings.

As you may have read, the Chowdhury story comes with the additional piquant detail that the Dallas lady had tipped him only 30 cents on a $10.70 fare. So in the end her misadventure only ended up costing her $100.30, as she gave Chowdhury a C-note as his reward. (Though he initially refused any reward at all, and it may be that he was only prepared to accept the equivalent of fares he lost while dealing with the situation, which of course would make her a bit less of a tightwad and him even more of a saint.)

Here’s a snapshot of Chowdhury’s life according to a BBC report:

[This will be my last post of Indo-African material, and I wanted to end on a note of cultural solidarity. Thanks again for accompanying me on my trip to Kenya.]

A few weeks ago, Amardeep wrote a nice report from a conference about Indo-African writers:

Desai argues that there were some members of the Asian community — especially artists, playwrights, and poets — who were trying to envision a sense of shared culture with their black African neighbors.

On that note, I thought I would share the work of my friend Sharlene Khan, a South African artist I met in 2004. She was born in Durban to Muslim and Christian parents (she is Christian) and lives now in Johannesburg, having collected two masters degrees in art, despite her deep antipathy toward all things institutional and official, and done residencies in Cairo and the south of France — like any good artist, trying to avoid joining the work force.

Indian painting has become very popular (and lucrative) in the global art market these days, with post-modern, post-cubist, semi-abstract renderings of Hindu deities and Indian village scenes being all the rage — the proteges and imitators of MF Husain. But Sharlene’s work is none of that.

Her themes are African, her sensibility humanist. One of her series concerns the plight of laborers and street musicians in Durban. She also did an installation based on the little tents that itinerant barbers, often immigrants from other parts of Africa, set up on the sidewalks of South African cities. She has painted murals like Diego Rivera and designed clothing for a fashion show, painting the fabric and inscribing it with text.

A good phrase to describe her stance is the title of the painting above: “It Started Off as Them and Ended Up as Me.”

While most people are in favor of charitable giving, not everybody likes charitable givers. While some donors are seen as saintly figures, donating their hard earned cash for the benefit of the less fortunate, others are seen as social climbers trying to attain respectability by using money generated by less socially beneficial business practices. Consider the story of Darshan Dhaliwal, the gas station king of the Midwest, a man with both supporters and detractors:

The University of Wisconsin-Parkside has received a $4.5 million contribution from Milwaukee businessman Darshan Dhaliwal. The donation, the largest private gift in the university’s 38-year history, … will help fund expansion of the university’s Communication Arts Building … The expanded facility will be named Dhaliwal Hall. Dhaliwal Hall will be the first new academic building on campus since … 1979. [Link]

Dhaliwal is a very wealthy man by all accounts, although it’s hard to know exactly how many gas stations his company owns, especially since he wont provide a figure. In 2000, a he confirmed that he owned at least 400 in 8 states, the “NRI of the month award” over the summer said that he owns “nearly 1,000 gas stations” across the country. This statement, from over a decade ago, claims that “Dhaliwal Enterprises… employs 5,000 people and posts annual profits that exceed $50 million.” In the end, it’s impossible to tell for sure with a private company. What we know is that he’s a very big fish, who operates gas stations in somewhere around twelve states between the coasts.

He has also been a controversial figure in Milwaukee. In 2000, he was accused by some community activists of not doing enough to prevent drug paraphernalia at his stations, sometimes by managers or clerks [see photos]:

There’s the crack pipes actually sitting in the Chore Boy box, on an empty register drawer, next to the ephedrine. Some of the clerks are embarrassed about having to sell this stuff. This is how the manager wants it done. [Link]

… neighborhood leaders asked on numerous occasions to meet with Dhaliwal about their concerns with graffiti, loitering, drug dealing and other problems at the Citgo station. [Link]

Dhaliwal disagreed, saying he was responsive and that he was also being singled out. In a 2000 article, he said:

… he sent a letter to each of the lessees at his 22 Milwaukee gas stations, asking them to stop selling roses with glass tubes, small scales, cigarette papers and Blunt cigars - all items that were known to be purchased for drug use.

The real problem, Dhaliwal says, is not that he won’t cooperate, but rather that the neighborhood groups are asking too much of him. He can’t understand why neighbors are singling him out as an owner, and not asking other area gas stations to comply. [Link]

I read this article in the Cultural Connect (thanks, Sumaya) on desis and philanthropy that I’ve been mulling over for the past few days. NYU law student Maneka Sinha argues, among other things, that: a) South Asian Americans are more likely than other Americans of color to engage in international philanthropy and less likely to donate to American causes, b) the reason for this trend is because most South Asians identify as brown first rather than as American, and c) brown people should donate to domestic causes in order to assert our American identity to the mainstream population.

I have many thoughts on the article. But first, let’s go through Sinha’s arguments:

The national US population only donate to international causes at a rate of 2.2% of all charitable activity. Minority groups, on the other hand, tend to “give back” on an international scale at a higher rate of 13%. Though as a whole minority groups focus on international giving at higher rates, there are discrepancies between these rates among different ethnic groups. While all minority groups demonstrate a strong tradition of giving at home and abroad, African Americans tend to focus a large degree of their charitable activity on domestic efforts supporting community churches, other community organizations, and education. Asian Americans place the least emphasis on international giving, focusing a majority of charitable efforts on the Asian American community and education. The Latino community gives internationally at a level somewhere between those of the Black and Asian American communities and also tends to focus its charitable efforts on its own community here in the US as well as on education. However, South Asian Americans in particular often give back to communities tied not to their own upbringing, but to their parents’ upbringing – namely, communities in South Asia.

Though it may be hard to swallow, the truth remains that we are American – we’ve been raised, trained, and educated here. If we don’t establish ourselves as an active force investing in the development of our communities and in aiding those members of the American population less fortunate than our own “model” South Asian community, our kids won’t either. And not only that, we will continue to remain somewhat isolated in a nation that benefits from our skills, talents and brainpower. Cringing at the thought of being “American” without addressing the underlying reasons why we shy away from that label is not an option – it is necessary to give back to the communities where our future generations will be raised in. Showing the mainstream population that we identify as American and are fully invested in the betterment of our local communities will help the general population appreciate us as such and ultimately allow us to shatter some of those glass ceilings.

Having had to close down our bureau offices in Los Angeles at the end of December and subsequently moving to Houston, I’ll admit that I’ve been missing the wonderful desi arts scene out in L.A. Fortunately, Houston has the fourth largest desi population in the U.S. and with it comes an emerging arts scene out here that is full of possibility. On that note, this Friday I will be attending Houston-based Shunya Theater’s production of the play Naga Mandala::

Combining two traditional Indian oral tales, Naga Mandala features a story-within-a-story. A cursed playwright must stay awake all night in the temple, and as he attempts to do so he meets the spirit of a Story who slipped out of an old woman’s mouth as she snored. The Story is that of a young bride who is neglected by her indifferent husband and attempts to win his affection with a love potion; instead, she enchants a King Cobra who begins to visit her every night while her husband is away.

A play in English featuring original music by the Shunya musicians and dance choreography by Mahira

Stages Repertory Theatre
3201 Allen Parkway
Houston, TX 77019
(Directions to theatre)
February 9th - February 25th
Fridays and Saturdays at 8 PM, Sundays at 3PM

I know that I haven’t had the time to organize a Texas meet-up yet (it will have to wait until March), so hopefully I will see some SM readers at this play. Tickets are still available as far as I know.

Quite predictably, my inbox was blowing up this morning and the news of a bizarre love triangle at the workplace was the only thing people wanted to talk about. It was the first item at our weekly office meet-up (under the heading “safety”). At my workplace safety always comes first. So THIS is what they mean by a “water cooler topic”:

This is the story everyone’s talking about at the water cooler today. (Fortunately, I sit right next to the water cooler.) NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak has been charged with attempted murder of another astronaut, who was in a astronaut love triangle with another astronaut. She also had on diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop on the drive. Okay, so attempted murder and kidnapping aren’t cool, but if they have to happen, I’m pretty happy that astronauts are involved. [Link]

First of all, if I was a rockstar I would totally name my band “astronaut love triangle.” It’s so edgy. If you click on my first link it will lead you to the arrest report which provides details about the steel mallet, rubber tubing, knife, pepper spray, large trash bags, wigs, and trench coat involved. I will spare you re-hashing the details that have been replayed on the news all day. This far into my post I am SURE you are all wondering “where is the desi angle?” Stay with me a moment.

Earlier this week Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams (see previous posts 1,2,3) set the spacewalking record for a woman. This is an amazing achievement that took many long hours of hard work in a dangerous environment!:

U.S. astronaut Sunita Williams has now spent more time in space [outside of a vehicle] than any other woman, setting the record on Sunday.

She and a crew mate upgraded the international space station’s cooling system.

Williams broke the previous female spacewalking record of more than 21 hours when she and Michael Lopez-Alegria completed the second of what could be a precedent-setting three spacewalks in nine days. The new record is 22 hours and 27 minutes. [Link]

So what do these two seemingly unrelated news stories have in common besides the fact that they both involve astronauts? Three words: Maximum Absorption Garment (MAG).

Aishwarya Rai, who has been in the news lately because of her engagement to Abhishek Bachchan, has apparently been ritually married to not one but two trees before her real marriage (thanks, Antahkarana). The aim is to counter the astrological effects of being born a Manglik:

But Ash is reportedly blighted with what in astrological terms is described as “manglik dosh,” which means that the planet Mars (mangla) and possibly even the planet Saturn are in the seventh house. People with manglik dosh are prone to multiple marriages, according to San Francisco Bay Area Vedic astrologer Pandit Parashar. That means Ash’s marriage to Abhishek could either end in divorce or his death.

In Hindu tradition, in order to offset the evil influence of manglik dosh, a woman should marry a peepal or banana tree before she ties the knot with her fiancé. Or she could even marry a clay urn, which should be broken soon after the nuptial ceremonies, signifying that the bride has become a widow, and the manglik dosh problem has been solved.

It’s not known if Ash has married, or plans to marry, an urn, but she reportedly has married a peepal tree in the holy city of Varanasi, and a banana tree in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. (link)

The Indian media is reporting that a case has been filed against the Bachchan family by lawyer Shruti Singh to the effect that these types of practices promote untouchability. She has also suggested that it’s offensive to women.

There has been some discussion of this event on the blog Feministing, and one commenter there points out that the practice of marrying a tree can also be recommended for men, though I haven’t been able to confirm that. (If true, that would definitely weaken the case that this is a misogynistic ritual.) Other commenters have suggested that this is probably pretty harmless in the big scheme of things — especially since honor killings, dowry killings, child marriages, and forced marriages are still problems in Indian society.

What do readers think? Is this “backward” practice part of a slippery slope (only one step away from things that are much more problematic), or something basically harmless? What do you think of Shruti Singh’s claim that this practice promotes untouchability? I must admit I don’t know very much about Hindu astrology, and so can’t say what role caste plays in these practices in general.

In the annals of teaching, there’s an old saying that things start getting twisted when the metric becomes the goal rather than simply the metric. Sadly the warning holds in both the classroom and the field of conflict with tragic results. Stratpage reports on the bizarre case of a staged Islamic militant sting operation in Kashmir -

February 6, 2007: In Kashmir, police investigators uncovered a strange incident of murder and resume building by ambitious, and amoral, police. Two police commanders have been arrested for killing innocent Kashmiri Moslems, and claiming that the dead men were Islamic militants. The policemen enhance their promotion prospects as a result of successful encounters with Islamic militants. But new security measures on the border (Israeli night vision equipment, new sensors, UAVs) have made it much more difficult for the Islamic terrorists to get from their training camps in Pakistan, into Kashmir. The shortage of terrorists to kill led some police to go after innocent civilians. This is a publicity disaster for India, which had been gaining more support from most Kashmiris for a peace deal. The accused police will have to be prosecuted honestly and vigorously in order to calm down Kashmiri public opinion. So far, four police, including two commanders, have been arrested for three murders. There may have been many more.

Other press accounts color in more of the details -

I hate the New York Times Vows Section. I hate how the couple is always young (or young-at-heart!), how the bride is always so quirky and brainy, how the guy is so creative in his wooing of her, how the article name drops schools, professions, connections, and associations as if the NYTimes were a paid fluffer for social ranking porn. And that’s before we meet the parents.

So I wouldn’t have stumbled across this gem if Gawker.com hadn’t brought it to my attention. At first glance, Frances Wu and Rommel Nobay appear to fit the profile:

Mr. Nobay, whose first language is Swahili…was named for a military leader, in his case Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Mr. Nobay was born in New York, but spent most of his youth in Kenya, his parents’ birthplace, and also in Goa in India, where their ancestors originated. Eventually his family settled in the United States, where he learned English, graduated from Princeton and received a master’s in public health from Yale.

Ms. Wu is a Virginia-born Chinese-Japanese American, who speaks more Japanese than Chinese…Ms. Wu remembers feeling “immediately understood,” and she had little trouble grasping his sense of dual kinship with Goa and Africa.

Cosmopolitan, eccentric background, well-traveled, Ivied, quirky, polished professionals, romantic discovery of soul mate…All good, right? But wait!

As their dating progressed, Ms. Wu researched Mr. Nobay online and learned that in 1998 he sued Princeton, unsuccessfully, for defamation after the university notified medical schools he had applied to that his applications contained misrepresentations and altered his academic record.

What the hoo-ha? Rommel, is this true? I couldn’t believe that the brother would let browns down, so I decided to investigate further… by reading on. According to the AP in 1998 (also via Gawker):

The graduate, Rommel Nobay, had admitted he told numerous lies and half-truths in applying to Princeton and later to medical school. He claimed that he was part black and a National Merit Scholar and that a family of lepers had donated half their beggings to support his dream. … Nobay, 30, a computer science teacher from New Haven, admitted that he was not, in fact, a Merit Scholar and that a family of lepers had not helped send him to school. He also acknowledged that he doesn’t know whether he has any black blood.

Stand tall my friend Rommel. Stand proud. Military history (and the Sepia Mutiny)on this day salutes you. For within the hallowed halls of academia, and the gloried annals of the Grey Lady, I can think of none besides you who, for however a sweet and fleeting moment, got people to believe that lepers helped fund your schooling.

As for me, I think I just might read this section more often…

If you watch a little kid with a pile of stuff, you’ll often see them sorting. They’re putting some things together and separating others. On Sesame Street they sing “Which of these things are not like the other … “, it’s the first step towards developing a sense of discrimination … and also the first step towards discriminating. Still, it seems like a fairly basic human activity, even when categories are contested. Therefore, I was amused to read two stories recently about eliminating these divisions:

In conservative Nepal, authorities recently granted an official citizenship document to 40-year-old Chanda Musalman which lists “him” as both male and female:

With elections approaching, government teams are currently touring the country issuing certificates of citizenship. One team came to Chanda’s village in western Nepal. Chanda, who has had no sex-change surgery, asked the officials to erase the words male and female, listed under gender. They obliged, and ascribed Chanda’s gender as “both”… It is unclear how this unique legal status will play out in practice - for instance, how it will affect Chanda’s marriage rights. [Link]

A similar desire to eliminate pigeonholes is sounded in the opinion column of the NYT today, by an author who calls for the abolition of racial categories on the census:

There seems to be an emerging consensus that the system of racial classification that has dominated national politics and the census for nearly two centuries is so fraught with imprecision — and so tainted by racist ideas that have been disproved by science — that it should eventually be dropped altogether.

This view has been percolating among census historians for years. But it has gained traction since the 1990s, when there was a pitched battle over a proposal that would have added a “multiracial” category to the 2000 census. A compromise allowed people to check more than one box for race. But that change only fueled the debate by revealing a conflict between the fixed racial categories that have long dominated American life and a different sense of identity that’s clearly on the rise among younger Americans. [Link]

My family has been caught betwixt and between racial categories before. Back in the early 1970s my mom cut her hand and had to go to the hospital. The two nurses there started to argue about whether to denote her as white or black on the intake form. The white nurse pointed out that my mom is light (she needs sunscreen, unlike me), while the black nurse argued that since she isn’t really white, she must be black. Finally my father demanded that they admit her right away, telling them that they could put her in whatever category they wanted once the doctor saw her. Still, this story doesn’t argue that there should be no categories at all, just that categories should be useful (and that classification should be secondary to medication). So personally, I don’t get the argument for the abolition of racial categories altogether as long as they remain socially relevant.

I’ve blogged earlier about how India tends to attract B-list musicians, ones no longer at the peak of their popularity but often with some emotional connection to India. Here’s another example — Ricky Martin will be performing in India next month (HT to Hilal)

Do I have enough gel in my hair?

However, this concert is a bit different. It’s a private performance at a “high profile shaadi in Jaipur”. The match between former Menudo star and “Mumbai-based industrialist Neeraj Raja Kocchar” (the father of the groom) was made by DJ Aqeel, fresh from spinning disks for the well heeled at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Apparently slightly past their prime international pop stars are the new status symbol for extravagant weddings — who knew? Now I know what to get the tycoon who has everything.

I was also surprised to read that this wasn’t Martin’s first performance in India. In 2005, he performed a benefit for children with HIV/AIDS at the Taj Mahal as part of his ongoing engagement with the issue of children’s rights:

Martin, however, is no stranger to India. He has visited the country several times, most recently to record the string arrangements for his first English-language album in five years, “Life”. Martin, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, has long been a strong advocate of children’s rights and protection through his Ricky Martin Foundation. He also backs groups working to prevent child trafficking and prostitution in several countries, including India. [Link]

Martin rescued three young girls from the streets of Kolkata from a life of prostitution… [Link]

Social activism. It’s not just for Bono and Madonna and Peter Gabriel and Bob Geldorf and … any more.

While all the wannabe flavors-of-the-week announce they will be running for President (way earlier than any of us should even care), the one race I’ve been keeping a close eye on is the one for Louisiana’s Governor’s house. Just take a look at what the polls show:

In a bid to become the first Indian American governor in the United States, U.S . Congressman Bobby Jindal, R-La., has announced his candidacy for governor of Louisiana.

Significantly, a recent independent poll said he would soundly crush current Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco - who has been under fire by the slow pace of recovery after hurricanes Katrina and Rita - in any rematch of their 2003 race.

In an e-mail to supporters Jan. 22, the 35-year-old Jindal said, “Our state, our communities, and our families have been through some very tough times. There is clearly a hunger for a new approach to governing…” [Link]

So what has Jindal been doing that has put him so far in front? One word: Katrina. People are sick of almost every elected official in the state of Louisiana except for Jindal (whose own house was damaged), who has escaped much of the wrath because he has been getting bills passed to help his constituents.

The poll, conducted Jan. 13-14 by Southern Media and Opinion Research, said about 59 percent of 600 likely voters said they would vote for Jindal, while 35 percent prefer Blanco.

The survey also found that the state’s voters have made up their minds about the governor’s race, with the primary set for Oct. 20 and a runoff, if needed, Nov. 17.

In a three-way race with Democratic public service commissioner Foster Campbell, the totals are: Jindal, 58 percent; Blanco, 31 percent; and Campbell, 6 percent.

Fewer than seven percent of those surveyed are undecided or refused to specify the candidate they would vote for in a race between Jindal and Blanco. [Link]

If you’ll all remember, one of the chief re-envisioned reasons that President Bush gave for taking the U.S. into a war in Iraq (after WMDs had been discredited) centered around the idea that with a democracy in place in the middle of the Middle East, neighboring nations would see it as a shining example of how their own governments could be if only they chose good over evil. Bush was half right. Iraq is turning into an example for its neighbors. The Christian Science Monitor reports on how democracy gets spread:

MULTAN, PAKISTAN - In this Punjabi city of shrines, Shiites and Sunnis prayed side by side during Ashura this week, the holiest holiday for the world’s 150 million Shiite Muslims. But a province away, suicide bombers attempted to strike Shiite processions throughout Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, leaving as many as 21 dead and more than 40 injured in three separate incidents, including two suicide attacks.

The violence, the latest in a sharp uptick against Pakistan’s Shiite minority, has heightened concerns that Iraq’s conflict may be feeding sectarian violence here. Whether the conflict in Iraq is capable of igniting Pakistan’s simmering sectarian tensions raises questions about a growing global sectarian war…

The answer is important, analysts say, because Pakistan’s 30 million Shiites - numbering more than Iraq’s - could become a flash point if sectarian violence spreads. [Link]

The belief that we could simply plant democracy like Johnny Appleseed is an example of the soft bigotry of unrealistic expectations. Most people that knew anything about the culture and history of the region basically foretold what has happened since. After a couple centuries of colonialism and arbitrarily imposed borders you can’t just expect people to forget their old conflicts to pray at the alter of democracy. Tocqueville in his 1835 work “Democracy in America” cautioned that democracy’s fatal flaw was that it could lead to a tyranny of the majority. In Iraq the Sunnis seem determined to prevent such a tyranny before it even begins. The great fear now is that the Muslim belief in “Ummah” will cause this fire to spread even further.

For some, Al Qaeda’s war against Shiites has already ignited tensions in Pakistan. Editorials in leading newspapers - particularly after this week’s suicide bombings - speak of a “new anti-Shiite wave that is radiating from Iraq …” and President Pervez Musharraf has warned of the need to diffuse sectarianism “not just for the country’s security, but for the entire Muslim world.”

Such fears may be well grounded, even though the number of sectarian killings is down when compared with the past. In January, police investigators in Karachi announced that Al Qaeda worked with local sectarian groups to carry out some of the largest suicide attacks against sectarian targets last year, which left more than 60 dead, according to local news reports. And this past week’s suicide attacks bore the signature of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan, observers say.

Whether or not it spells a war emanating from Iraq, the West should pay heed, say analysts… [Link]

I can’t say that I’m brimming with enthusiasm about the Super Bowl, what with (a) my team not being in it, and (b) the two-week break that precedes it, which really kills the post-season viewing momentum in the name of cramming in seven more days of bullshit corporate hype. Having said that, though, this seems an appropriate time to spotlight the work of Aditi Kinkhabwala, a real-life desi woman sportswriter, who had a Super Bowl-related piece this week at Sports Illustrated’s website. In it, she proclaims her love for Indianapolis Colts linebacker Gary Brackett, whose path to football stardom was several times barred by family tragedy:

Less than a week later, [Brackett’s father] Granville passed away, his heart finally having given out.

Brackett finished that season with 25 tackles. Then shortly after the Super Bowl, in February 2004, [Brackett’s mother] Sandra was rushed to the hospital for an emergency hysterectomy. She never left, an operating-table stroke putting her into what would be a fatal coma.

Brackett went back out to Indy that summer, until, just before mini-camp, he found out his brother Greg had leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant. Gary told head coach Tony Dungy the outside shot of staving off Greg’s leukemia was more important than fighting for a roster spot and he skipped the camp.

A few weeks after he made the donation Brackett fought his way onto Dungy’s roster. He again played special teams, before pounding Denver for 11 tackles in his one start in January. And before Greg, despite the transplant, succumbed to the cancer in February.

The other reason Aditi loves Brackett, besides his triumph over the odds, is that he played his college ball at Rutgers. In addition to her column at SI.com, Kinkhabwala is a staff sports writer at the Bergen Record in New Jersey, where her beat is Rutgers sports. She covered the unlikely success of the Scarlet Knights football team this past season, and is now deep in the men’s and women’s basketball seasons.

One of the side characters in the recent documentary Wordplay is a desi crossword puzzle aficionado named Kiran Kedlaya, who came in second at the 2006 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (the Crossword Superbowl, if you will). Kedlaya is an MIT mathematics professor who specializes in polynomial equations. According to the interview on Cogito.org, he started competitive crossword solving in graduate school, and says the skill works the same part of the brain math does:

Is there a connection between math and crosswords? Dr. Kedlaya thinks that math, music and computer science – popular professions among “solvers” – tap into a similar part of the brain. Wordplay, says Dr. Kedlaya, suggests that the link is using language in unique way. In a crossword, figuring out the word from the clue is not sufficient; decoding how the letters cross is vital, too. (link)

This is corroborated in the film Wordplay, where it’s pointed out that a disproportionate number of the top crossword puzzle-solvers are people with computer science and mathematics backgrounds. It makes a certain kind of sense — though I might have expected verbal types to have a leg up in some ways.

The obvious issue this might raise for people is, to what extent is crossword puzzle solving a kind of adult version of a spelling bee? I tend to think the skills involved are somewhat different: while doing the NYT Sunday Crossword requires a large reservoir of arcane knowledge, it doesn’t require (or benefit from) rote memorization.

After the jump: a super-easy Sepia Mutiny themed Crossword I myself created, using a free service.

Oh this is too rich. Thank you, thank you, thank you to tipster IslandGirl for placing on the news tab the story about the reams of confidential visa application info that the Indian Consulate in San Francisco sent off for recycling to an open-air facility that doesn’t shred, and where anybody can stroll in off the street. The San Francisco Chronicle did just that.

Thousands of visa applications and other sensitive documents, including paperwork submitted by top executives and political figures, sat for more than a month in the open yard of a San Francisco recycling center after they were dumped there by the city’s Indian Consulate.

The documents, which security experts say represented a potential treasure trove for identity thieves or terrorists, finally were hauled away Wednesday after The Chronicle inspected the site and questioned officials at the consulate and the recycling facility.

Among the papers were visa applications submitted by Byron Pollitt, chief financial officer of San Francisco’s Gap Inc., and Anne Gust, wife of California Attorney General Jerry Brown.

The best part, though, are the tin-ear responses by the various Indian consular officials. There’s a semantic argument:

Information on the documents includes applicants’ names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, professions, employers, passport numbers and photos. Accompanying letters detail people’s travel plans and reasons for visiting India.

“As we see it, the documents are not confidential,” said B.S. Prakash, the consul general. “We would see something as confidential if it has a Social Security number or a credit card number, not a passport number.”

A cultural argument:

At the Indian Consulate, Consul General Prakash said there may be a cultural dimension to the level of outrage related to the incident among Western visa applicants.

“In India, I would not be alarmed,” he said. “We have grown up giving such information in many, many places. We would not be so worried if someone had our passport number.”

An environmental argument:

Deputy Consul General Sircar said that in other countries, Indian officials are able to go to the roofs of their offices and burn documents they’re no longer able to store.

“In America, you cannot do that,” he said.

All this stuff was sitting out there, in boxes marked “Visa Applications” at an open-access, community recycling center in Haight-Ashbury. I’m waiting for them to blame Nancy Pelosi!

If you get your news mainly from US outlets, you’ve probably heard by now about the alleged plot foiled yesterday in Birmingham, England, in which extremists planned to kidnap a British Muslim soldier whilst on leave and execute him as a collaborator. There are some reports today that the plotters had as many as 25 targets identified.

But you may not have heard about the big debate that has erupted in Britain, also this week, about the results of a survey and report called “Living Apart Together: British Muslims and the Paradox of Multiculturalism,” by Policy Exchange, which most reports describe as a right-of-center think-tank. The results of the survey that have garnered the most attention suggest, among other findings, that a surprisingly large proportion of British Muslims would like to live under Sharia. There are of course major debates about how the question was phrased and what the responses imply in practice. It is also clear that the British Muslim community is no monolith, and all commentators are zooming in on the fact that more “extremist” or “separatist” stances are much more common among the youngest respondents (18-24) and progressively less so in the older groups. Again, what this means is being hotly discussed.

I don’t have time right now to do the topic justice, but hopefully commenters here, especially from the UK, will give us some perspectives. My man Sunny Hundal is already on the case along with the commenters at Pickled Politics. There are many other views online at the Guardian’s op-ed site, including this one from Dave Hill and this from Timothy Garton-Ash; you can root around the main UK papers for more. Be prepared for fatuous pieces too, such as this one that says folks shouldn’t worry about youth Islamic radicalism in the UK as it’s just the same kind of temporary rebellion that hippie kids displayed in the 1960s. Talk about adding nothing to the debate. Finally, if you have the time and inclination you can read the full report and crunch the numbers; let us know what you find.

However I found the most valuable summation of the discussion in this article at the website Spiked, by the lead author of the report, Munira Mirza (the report co-authors are Abi Senthilkumaran and Zein Ja’far). Here the sister responds to the first wave of discussion and makes some useful points: