The jury has returned in the Lina Sinha case, the now 40 year old former Principal of the Montessori School of New York. The verdict? Guilty.

The former principal of a Manhattan private school was convicted yesterday of having sex with one of her students in a classroom when he was about 13 and she was about 30. The jury deadlocked on charges that the principal… also had sex with a second student about five years after she seduced the first boy. [Link]

There’s actually a ton of desiness in here. Prosecutors brought up the fact that she lived with her parents to depict her as a sheltered woman, hence her interest in much younger guys:

Prosecutors portrayed Ms. Sinha as a sheltered woman who lived with her parents in the town house housing the school, which her family owned, until she was in her late 30s. [Link]

How did she live with her parents in the building the school was set in? Simple. They own the school. She not only lived with mom and dad, but she worked in the family business as well:

Sinha has been a teacher for 16 years at the Montessori International School of New York, which was established by her parents in 1969 … The parents own two similar schools in the city. [Link]

Interestingly, reviews of the school are very harsh and negative, particularly on the family owned aspect (to be fair, these were written after the scandal broke and may not be accurate):

It is a completely creepy school. It is family-run, and there seems to be absolutely no accountability. Parents are discouraged from being involved with the school and the teachers; it’s unclear what the teachers’ credentials are… we were quite traumatized by the school. The graduates of the school … seem to be brainwashed, as if all their personality had been bled out of them — it is very very strange. [Link]

My friend Sanjay decided to have a little fun this past week with “Click” and “Clack”, the brothers who host that wonderful radio show Car Talk (that we’ve ALL listened to at least once on a weekend morning). I should clarify that although his question was funny, he wasn’t entirely joking. Thus, it is a legitimate question, the response to which might be quite informative and useful for some of our Hindu readers who also love their cars. Here is Sanjay’s question:

Hey guys,

I have a macabre question. I’m both Hindu and a car enthusiast. Hindus customarily get cremated when we die. I’m putting together my will and would like to require my ashes to be deposited into the gas tank of my favorite car. Then, I want the car driven down my favorite river road in California. This is how I want my ashes poetically spread. My question is: Will this also poetically destroy the car? If so, I need to make sure the car is then driven directly to a Pick-N-Pull.

Thanks guys,

Sanjay Shah
Venice, CA… [Link]

You can listen to the Tappet Brother’s on-air advice here. Hurry though because the link will only work until the next episode airs. After that you’ll have to download it as a podcast.

Set adrift on memory bliss…

My screen says, “Please replace this generic password.”

Either my kappipaal hasn’t kicked in yet or I’ve got a severe case of Spring fever (perhaps cowbell could cure it?). I can’t focus, let alone devise a password with 12 letters, one symbol, two numbers and an exclamation point. One of my favorite co-workers stops by my desk, with an eyebrow raised.

“You look lost.”

“Can you like, pick a password for me? Like, passwords are hard.”

“Like math?”

This is our favorite inside joke, this reference to Barbie’s great fustercluck of ‘92. Still, despite legendary vacuous utterances, Barbie is beloved not just by me but also his six-year old daughter, because as we three agree, them Bratz dollz are slatterns.

“Sure I’ll pick something for you.” He seems serious.

“You like music. Use a song lyric.”, he instructs, before striding in to his office, which is next door to my desk. Then he pops his head back out…

“I used to use ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine’ as mine.”

“R.E.M. fan, eh?”

He smiles at me in response. We’re nearly the same age; we were both dorky loners who probably spent all our free time between classes with our headphones on, tuning out the world. We both remember how the release of “Green” in 1988, during the fall quarters of our Freshman/Junior year in high school defined a moment, a mood.

Earlier this week I went on a very long rant about this Dana Parsons article in the LA Times on the sex trafficking of Nepali girls. Today Dana Parsons’ column takes sensationalist trash to a whole other level. Normally I wouldn’t subject anyone to yet another lecture on primitivism, but I think this particular piece is too precious to keep to myself.

Parsons’ article concerns his attempt at something called “perspective.” He received an email recently from his cousin who is on business in Mumbai, filled with details on the horrible living conditions there. Because of this said email, Parsons now feels a sense of enlightenment and gratitude at the fact that he doesn’t have to live in the squalor that his cousin describes.

You can already guess where this is going. The column outlines the horrors of Mumbai, as narrated by Parsons’ cousin:

There are animals everywhere. Common to see dogs lying in areas by the road. I don’t know how they survive, but I’m told animals are sacred and you watch out for them. There are cows wandering through the streets.

We saw several naked people. Not always children. Several relieving themselves.

Our driver pulled over near some marshy area that I took to be rice fields. I got the camera out and was ready to shoot when we saw that the driver was relieving himself at the side of the car.

Truth be told, I’m really not surprised that there are people who view the world the way that Dana Parsons does. What I do find upsetting is that the LA Times is carrying this trash and passing it off as journalism. Then again, what else should I expect — time and time again I have been appalled at their international coverage. I will concede, however, that the LA Times is good for covering a few things, namely: state and local politics, the Hollywood industry, and most importantly, a certain college basketball team that’s going to rout Florida on Saturday. But even if the LAT has no intention of upgrading their international coverage, it’s time for them to cut Dana Parsons off from covering anything related to South Asia. He really needs to be stopped.

Sanjaya-kutta,

Why?

You make it so hard to cheer you on, when you do ugly things with your pretty, pretty tresses. It’s just not okay. At all. Don’t you care about the greater desi community? How will THEY be affected by your reckless decision to have bad hair? You represent our hopes and assimilative aspirations— be careful out there. We’re counting on you and if you fail, we will never forgive you. Ever. Unless you go to medical school.

Sanjaya Malakar performed “Bath Water.” Randy Jackson said “Listen, the hairdo is definitely interesting. I like the kind of Mohawk look.” Paula Abdul said “To watch it on stage and not go for it, it’s kind of like we’re going ah, come on.“ Simon Cowell said “I presume there was no mirror in your dressing room tonight.” Sanjaya replied “You’re just jealous that you couldn’t pull it off.” Simon said “I couldn’t I agree. Sanjaya, I don’t think it matters anymore what we say, actually. I genuinely don’t. I think you are in your own universe and if people like you, good luck.” [linkosity]

Still, I wish you only the best— I just do so with my eyes closed, until someone tells me it’s safe to open them again.

Sanjaya zindabad,

A K K A

The Sikh community has survived wars with the Mughals and then the British, the terrible bloodbath of the Partition, and then 1984 and its aftermath.

But according to a recent New York Times article, what is really weakening the defining symbol of Sikh community in India is just… well, laziness:

Like many young Sikhs, he found the turban a bother. It got in the way when he took judo classes. Washing his long hair was time-consuming, as was the morning ritual of winding seven yards of cloth around his head. It was hot and uncomfortable. (link)

And:

The dwindling numbers of turban wearers reflects less a loss of spirituality than encroaching Westernization and the accelerating pace of Indian life, Jaswinder Singh said.

He puts the start of rapid decline at the mid-1990s, as India began liberalizing its economy, more people began traveling abroad and satellite television arrived in the villages of Punjab. Working mothers are too rushed to help their sons master the skill of wrapping a turban, he said, and increasingly they just shrug and let them cut their hair.

“Everyone is working harder to buy themselves bigger cars,” he said. “They don’t have time to teach their children about the Sikh heroes. Boys take film stars as their idols instead.” (link)

Anecdotally, talking to cousins and other relatives, I’ve had the same impression: young Sikhs in India see the turban and beard as 1) hot and 2) unfashionable. It’s also interesting in this passage that busy working mothers are cited as part of the problem. (Quick poll for the Sikhs reading this: who taught you how to tie your pagri? Many Sikh men I know were taught by women in their families.)

Though she does have quotes from people who are unhappy about the phenomenon, I must confess that on an emotional level I do find Amelia Gentleman’s article a shade too cheery considering how much anxiety this trend causes amongst traditional Sikhs. Indeed, as the defining symbol of the Sikh tradition declines, it’s hard not to think of the core of the religion as declining as well.

Oddly, one of the factors named here — India’s hot climate — is less of a factor in places like the U.S., the U.K., and Canada.

sexxy5@biPrinc3ss sup

GujuHottiee120586: um…who the f r u??

sexxy5@biPrinc3ss kapila…its a new sn

GujuHottiee120586: what happened to NjDe$iQTpie

sexxy5@biPrinc3ss cant use it rite now

GujuHottiee120586: ???

sexxy5@biPrinc3ss remember that guy we met at bb las wknd

GujuHottiee120586: u mean U met…he looked like bert lol

sexxy5@biPrinc3ss eat me

GujuHottiee120586: yah wat abt him

sexxy5@biPrinc3ss he wont leave me alone!

GujuHottiee120586: wat do u mean

sexxy5@biPrinc3ss he keeps IMing n hes so anoying

GujuHottiee120586: so block his furry ass…don change ur sn n confuse ur frenz lol thats not very feministe of u

sexxy5@biPrinc3ss nooo…I cant…soooo meen

The Supreme Court has been asked to overturn a case arguing that under certain circumstances the fear of an abusive arranged marriage can be grounds for asylum.

The plaintiff’s request for asylum granted on appeal by the Second Circuit which argued that where forced marriages are valid and backed by law, the plaintiff “might well be persecuted in China - in the form of lifelong, involuntary marriage.”

The government is now asking the Supremes to overturn this verdict because they are afraid it would make America a haven for women fleeing abusive forced marriages. To be fair, they’re saying this is a decision that should be taken by Congress, and not the courts, but they also warn that this could lead to a flood of women in arranged marriages applying for asylum.

At the center of the case is a woman from China, not India:

At age 19, Gao was sold by her mother for the equivalent of $2,200 to become the wife of a man in her home village who, Gao says, will physically abuse her. [Link]

She was granted asylum by the appeals court, which extended the grounds under which one could traditionally apply for asylum:Approximately 60% of marriages worldwide are arranged

To qualify, an individual must show a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

In most cases, the persecution is meted out by a government. But the Second Circuit said in the Gao case that persecution could also stem from a personal relationship in combination with government-enforced customs.

…for they shall all be spermy. (Thanks Anonymous tipsters!)

My Stewie-like plan to flood the world with my genetics is even MORE likely to be successful than I previously fantasized. HA! From MSNBC:

U.S. women who eat a lot of beef while pregnant give birth to sons who grow up to have low sperm counts, researchers reported Tuesday.

They believe pesticides, hormones or contaminants in cattle feed may be to blame. Chemicals can build up in the fat of animals that eat contaminated feed or grass, and cattle are routinely given hormones to boost their growth.

“In sons of ‘high beef consumers’ (more than seven beef meals a week), sperm concentration was 24.3 percent lower,” the researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Human Reproduction…

Of the 51 men whose mothers remembered eating the most beef, 18 percent had sperm counts classified by the World Health Organization as sub-fertile.

Score ANOTHER one for Team Vegetarian. I’ve never TOUCHED red meat. w00t!

GujuHottiee120586: wuz up, ho?

NjDe$iQTpie: who u callin a ho, ho?

GujuHottiee120586: watevr

NjDe$iQTpie: OMFG, i totally forgot to tell u!

GujuHottiee120586: ??

NjDe$iQTpie: u r gonna DIE when u hear this

GujuHottiee120586: wtf? if its that big a deal u wouldve texted me. u need to stop w the frapuchinos lol

NjDe$iQTpie: biach, please…im desi, its all about the chai tea latte

GujuHottiee120586: like thats keepin it real…such a dumb name for a drink..i mean…is NOT a latte

NjDe$iQTpie: N E WAYZ

GujuHottiee120586: hurry up…my momz like tivod koffee with karan and shes going to watch it in like 2 secs

NjDe$iQTpie: FINE. ok u know how ur parents wanted u to go to penn soo bad n u were all, “hellz no, i aint goin to college n livin at home” n they were all sad n shit?

A few years ago, erstwhile mutineer Manish posted here about an enterprising Tiffinwalla in New York who would deliver healthy, vegetarian lunches (“2 chapatis, rice, dal, one vegetable, appetizer, dessert and pickle/chutney”) for all of $5.

I was living in California at the time and lazy ingrate that I am, I was green with longing, even as I was eating fresh Mallu food daily at home.

It just seemed like such a fantastic concept; New Yorkers got EVERYTHING, I wistfully thought. Couldn’t the left coast have had similar, especially during that arid, empty time that my Mother was abroad for two months? ;) I mean, protein shakes get old, y’all.

Apparently, my whining has been answered, according to a story in the grey lady which many of you were blowing up our tipline/news tab with (Thanks, Derick):

In Mumbai, formerly Bombay, the tiffin, or lunch, is prepared by the wife, mother or servant of the intended. In the United States, because of little time (and a lack of a domestic staff), many of these lunches are prepared by outsiders, but the underlying principle is the same…

Annadaata, which began as a homespun operation in 2002, has morphed into a business with several delivery people distributing meals each weekday across San Francisco. Kavita Srivathsan, 29, the chief executive of Annadaata, got her start by cooking meals for her new husband and his friends.

Srivathsan stumbled in to a market which was just waiting for someone like her to hook them up with comfort food:

She did not have a job at the time, so she spent her time learning how to cook Indian foods. Using recipes from her mother in south India, she experimented in the kitchen for a few hours each day. On a whim, she advertised $5 box meals on justindia.com, a Web site based in the San Francisco area that no longer exists. “That was the only time I ever did any advertising,” she said. “The very next day I got a few phone calls from people ordering the boxes, and from then on the word spread like wildfire.”

In an earlier thread, reader Sadaiyappan reminds us of the reverence with which many cultures in India regard paper and books:

Ok, I’m a tamil. Tamils were raised to respect paper because you get education through paper and all legal documents are of paper, if my foot accidentally touches a paper, I must touch the paper with my hands and then touch my eyes much like I am praying / being blessed. So we are not supposed to use paper to wipe our ass because it is disrespectfull to the paper… [Link]

Sheep poo paper, complete with flecks!

The Elephant Poo Poo Paper company makes stationery and related goods out of dried, odorless elephant shit:

We can make about 25 large sheets of paper from a single piece (or turd) of elephant poo poo!!! That translates into about 10 standard sized journals including the front and back covers! Neat, huh!?!?!?… [Link]

There is also paper made from Moose Droppings (site in Swedish), Sheep Droppings, and even Panda droppings. Yeah, I can’t see this going over in India at all …

There’s been quite a raft of South Asia-related coverage in the New York Times this past week or so.

Perhaps most importantly, the Times finally gets to Musharraf’s ugly confrontation with Pakistan’s legal establishment. Perhaps what’s most striking in the current instance is the fact that Pakistan’s rioting lawyers are only now getting the message that Mushie may not be good for business.

In business news, New York’s Citigroup offices are going to see a major round of layoffs soon, while the company’s Indian back office is going to continue to grow. A few thousand formerly well-paid bankers have suddenly grown quite enthusiastic about Lou Dobbs’ brand of anti-outsourcing populism, and are suddenly pining for John Kerry.

Third, unrelated to outsourcing, it seems the Indian publishing industry has been doing quite well in the past couple of years, even as conventional publishing in the U.S. has struggled. There is an editorial in the Hindustan Times by Peter Gordan to that effect, but more importantly, see the article in the Business Standard from a couple of weeks ago on the subject. Apparently blogs have been part of the growth of the industry:

What has given the industry the much-needed charge and brought about these changes? Says Pramod Kapoor, publisher, Roli Books, “The reading habits of people are seeing a lot of change and there is more thirst for gaining knowledge.” Kapoor feels a lot of the credit for this should be given to the media as well as the Internet boom.
“People on blogs talk about books and there is more awareness about the titles released. The media too has played its role by giving more space to the publishing industry.” Literary festivals too have helped interest in books and authors grow. (link)

This is good news. Societies with vibrant book publishing are generally ones with bright futures. (Yes, I am saying something upbeat about India. Someone must have put something in my Kool-Aid.)

As for the positive role played by blogs, I am sure that Manish’s exhaustive coverage of the effect of Shakira’s abdominal muscles on the Mumbai stock exchange must be the culprit.

Day 16 of my miseducation in Cricket: for a hot minute, I do not love my India, not after our Red Snapper reports that crap like this was stated with a straight face:

Just heard a reporter on NDTV interviewing disappointed fans in Bombay say to the camera — ‘It’s been a World Cup of tragedies, none bigger than India crashing out of the tournament’[Link]

Yes, that’s totally worse than someone’s neck getting snapped under the shadiest of circumstances. An anonymous tipster left a link to a BBC article by Mukul Kesavan—who has a book about cricket coming out in India later this year— on our news tab. I found it illuminating; I know next to nothing about this sport which Evil Abhi loathes so. ;) Here’s a random assortment of what your favorite bimbette Bedi-impersonator learned and/or found fascinating at the Beeb:

For the television channels that bought rights to beam the tournament to these fans, Friday’s defeat was a financial disaster.

Since the Reliance World Cup hosted by India in 1987, South Asia’s cricketing nations have become more and more influential in the conduct and administration of the one-day game.

…India won the Cup in 1983, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have won it in 1992 and 1996 respectively.

Mainly, though, the balance of power in world cricket has shifted from England and Australia towards the sub-continent for commercial reasons: the dawning realisation that India owns the only mass audience there is for the game.

India and Pakistan had resumed cricket relations after a long chill in 1978, just as limited-overs cricket was starting to take off.

The compulsive need to confront the old enemy led to the creation of a cricket circus in the Gulf sheikhdom, Sharjah, where, on neutral ground, the sub-continent’s blood feuds were re-played as one-day tournaments for the benefit of increasingly feverish and volatile audiences.

I’m still processing the bilious sortie by Shashi Tharoor, the Indian diplomat and author, outgoing undersecretary-general of the United Nations and failed candidate for the top job, in the opinion pages of last Friday’s New York Times. It’s the one where he announces that America and Americans are congenitally incapable of comprehending cricket, that the condition is incurable, and that after valiantly performing such educational mitzvahs as diagramming cricket play possibilities on bar napkins for baseball fans during breaks in World Series games, he has now given up; and hereby retreats to the world of connoisseurs who will gather, he tells us, to watch the final at the home of an expatriate where “of course there will be no Americans.”

Here’s his parting shot:

So here’s the message, America: don’t pay any attention to us, and we won’t pay any to you. If you wonder, over the coming weeks, why your Indian co-worker is stealing distracted glances at his computer screen every few minutes or why the South African in the next cubicle is taking frequent and furtive bathroom breaks during the working day, don’t even try to understand. You probably wouldn’t get it. You may as well learn to accept that there are some things too special for the rest of us to want to waste them on you.

Lovely! Elegant! Thoughtful! Um… diplomatic! Ever considered working for the United Nations?

Alright, so everyone has an off day. And sure, yeah, most people in the U.S. don’t get cricket. Not exactly a novel observation. So why not leave it at that? Instead Tharoor decides to actually argue the case, justifying his dismissal of this thing called “America” with an array of absurd statements. Americans, he says, “have about as much use for cricket as Lapps have for beachwear.” They follow baseball instead, which “is to cricket as simple addition is to calculus.” Tharoor has “even appealed to the Hemingway instinct that lurks in every American male by pointing out how cricket is so much more virile a sport.” All to no avail. But thanks to satellite television and the Internet, now “you can ignore America and enjoy your cricket.” After all: “Why try to sell Kiri Te Kanawa to people who prefer Anna Nicole Smith?”

But all of this is mere appetizer for the main dish, the Comparative Analysis of National Character. Take it away, maestro:

It’s no secret that Indian parents tend to meddle play more of an active role in their children’s lives than do American ones. Nor does this end when kids go away to University. Still, I was surprised to see how seriously even the IIT schools take their role “in loco parents” (which is Latin for “as crazy overbearing parents”).

The authorities in India’s premier engineering institute, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay (Mumbai), have cut off internet access to students in hostels at night. They feel that 24-hour internet access is hampering students’ academic performance and overall personality development… “they preferred to sit in their rooms and surf the net rather than interact with their mates. Academics are of primary importance for us but we also want our students to have a well-rounded personality…” [Link]

Helloooo? Who are they kidding - it’s a geek factory and proud of it. If students wanted a well rounded personality, they wouldn’t be at IIT, they’d be out partying and enjoying the Bombay nightlife. Amazingly, they’re not even the first IIT to do this either, IIT Madras cuts off net access for a shorter period of time, from 1 AM to 5AM.

What’s it really about? Well, in part I think it’s about pr0n:

The dean of students affairs, Prakash Gopalan, said one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students’ computers to see that bad content dominated over good. “In the end, this is the Indian taxpayers’ money as well as the IIT’s network and we have an obligation to ensure that it is not misused,” he said. [Link]

And in part it’s about exerting authority and making students show up to lecture:

… they were beginning to see a drop in attendance during morning lectures … “In the morning the students would not be fresh and attentive” … “It is working well for us now,” he said, “From personal experience I can tell you that I have two morning lectures beginning at 0800 and attendance is always 95%…” [Link]

Quite frankly, it’s absurd. If you’re training engineers, you want them to be able to work all night on their projects, and they need the internet to do so. This is like saying that you’re turning off electricity at night so that students don’t stay up all night studying, or worse yet, reading trashy novels. If you want students to show up for morning lectures, make them worth attending, and make the exams depend on in-class material. Otherwise trust your students to act like adults.

If you have a pulse then you know that the biggest news story of the past week has been the politically motivated purge of U.S. Attorneys not deemed loyal enough “Bushies.” The eight fired attorneys were all ones that Karl Rove and the Whitehouse felt weren’t acting partisan enough. They were either pursuing corruption cases against Republicans or not pursuing cases against Democrats hard enough. Evidence didn’t really matter, nor did the fact that of the eight attorneys 6 were Republican and two Independent. The most vociferous of the fired attorneys has been David Iglesias:

United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political. [Link]

What’s the first thing you do after you fire eight attorney’s who don’t play political ball? You hire new ones of course. You’d probably go for someone you know you could trust. A loyal “Bushie.” Meet the only (as far as I know) Indian American U.S. Attorney. Her name is Rachel Kunjummen Paulose and she was appointed to the recently vacated job in Minnesota. She is the youngest attorney, and the first woman in Minnesota to hold this post (thanks for the tip Ravi):

It seemed like a fairy-tale: University of Minnesota graduate goes to Yale Law, gets a few high-profile jobs, including stints at Dorsey & Whitney and the Justice Department, and winds up, at age 33, the youngest serving U.S. Attorney, the first woman to hold that position in Minnesota and the first U.S. Attorney of South Asian descent. Her appointment to the post is sponsored by Republican Senator Norm Coleman, but also endorsed by outgoing Democrat Mark Dayton, who makes it his final priority in the Senate to see her confirmation through in the waning hours of the session.

This is the narrative we have received from the media of the meteoric rise of Rachel Paulose, the new U.S. Attorney in the Minnesota district. But with the recent furor over the firings of the “Gonzales Seven”—several of whom were involved in ongoing corruption investigations, and others of whom have revealed that they were pressured to speed up investigations by sitting members of Congress—and their replacement by up-and-coming partisans, the curious case of Rachel Paulose merits a closer look. [Link]

The LA Times ran this story a few weeks ago on a local college professor’s work in Nepal to fight human trafficking. I’ve been mulling over the story for a while, so I didn’t blog about it right away. I wasn’t even sure why I was bothered, but then I read about After the Wedding last week, and I felt as though I had a moment of clarity. It’s funny how a fictitious story can sometimes help you better understand your own reality.

Anyway, back to the article. Six years ago, California State University professor Jeffrey Kottler visited a village in rural Nepal to study maternal mortality. During his visit, he discovered that sex traffickers were taking young girls from the village — sometimes through kidnapping, sometimes with their parents’ consent — and forcing them into prostitution in India. Kottler, who was very disturbed by the scenario, decided to buy a Nepali girl’s freedom. He paid the village school principal fifty dollars to ensure that the girl stayed in school and out of prostitution for at least one year. Within six years, through fundraising and having two Nepalis monitor the uses of the funds, Kottler bought the freedom of 42 girls, preventing them from ever being sold into sexual slavery.

So why exactly would this article bother me, you might ask? Let me be very clear: I applaud Jeffrey Kottler. I fully support what he is doing, and I wish there were more people in this world like him. He’s done more with his life than anyone I know. And believe you me, most of my friends work or have worked tirelessly in the public sector, organizing immigrant workers or opening a health clinic for the homeless or helping abused mothers find employment. Yet despite our collective efforts, I don’t think any of us can honestly say that we’ve been able to prevent anyone from entering a lifetime of servitude and forced prostitution.

So it’s not Kottler who bothers me, or the idea of non-browns helping browns. It’s the undertones of this article and others like it that I do have a problem with. Those of you who follow my posts and my personal blog know that I generally cringe when it comes to stories of westerners “saving” the primitives from themselves. I cringe largely because these stories tend to reek of condescension, and they overlook the work that the “natives” have also done in the same field.

Likewise, the writer of this article uses interesting anecdotes to highlight just how “backward” the Nepalis are. The villagers are so poor that the typical house has “an animal to be tethered to the back wall.” “It’s a place where a father can be killed by a tiger.” There are blatant strokes of sensationalism here, much of which has nothing to do with anything. What exactly is the writer trying to do by evoking so much animal imagery? Then he states that the natives are so devoid of education that they “didn’t know where America was.” Oooh, shocking. Never mind that most Americans I know wouldn’t even be able to point out Nepal, much less India, on a map either.

Last week, a Sikh in New Zealand got on a Qantas flight from Queenstown to Auckland. You can guess what happened next … he got kicked off because the other passengers didn’t want him flying with them.

“People either side of me were saying they don’t want me on here … One of the ladies told another guy ‘I’m not comfortable with him on this plane’,” Mavi says. “She was talking to a whole group. The lady started it and then somebody went and spoke to the captain. The Qantas man requested me and said ‘You’re not allowed to travel in this plane because the passengers are not happy’…” [Link]

I hadn’t realized that commercial flights were like survivor, that the passengers are polled and one unlucky one is voted off. Silly me, I thought you paid, you got checked out by security, and you disembarked at your destination. Things seem to be a bit … different on the other side of the world.

Of course, Qantas has a different account of what happened. They say simply that:

A Qantas Airways spokesman from Sydney [said] … the passenger “displayed behaviour prior to boarding and on board before departure which concerned our staff”. After “careful consideration” a decision was made to offload the passenger. [Link]

Day 13 of my Cricket tuition: I’m feeling a bit woozy from all the head-spinning developments regarding certain tragic events of this World Cup. Surely there is no better moment to focus on sweeter aspects of the game, specifically how an essay penned by my erstwhile intern Amar Shah showed up on ESPN the other day. I felt nothing but consummate delight when I followed the link which was submitted repeatedly to the bunker’s hotline; there in baby blue, with his gorgeous wife too, the boy whom I had been surprisingly fond of, even before we had ever met.

It was 2002 and Amar Shah was a student from the University of Florida. I was in a windowless office at Preston Gates, near the White House. I began receiving persistent instant messages from someone with a memorable, if young-sounding screen name. Typical questions about what his internship would be like and how he should prepare gave way to actual conversation and fellowship. Who was this kid? That first day of our program, I remember that though I was excited about finally meeting all of my interns, I was extra-curious about the one who would later jump up in a hyperactive and spontaneous moment mid-orientation and show off how he already knew not just our names, but our AIM screen names, as well. And I thought he had just been chatting with me. ;)

That summer, I held his hand as he crushed on the unattainable: a girl so stunning, she looked as if she had stepped out of a Moghul miniature. I fretted over him while he bounced around the Hill; I kept him company when he was the last of my baby birds to fly away, that tear-drenched August day. It was fitting that Amar’s would be the final flight to leave DC; it was a small comfort that I had a few extra hours to spend with someone I had grown so attached to, someone who since then has always made me proud.

It’s almost over but shouldn’t go unnoticed on the Mutiny. The river Indus, or the Sindhu, lent her name to a land and a people. Now, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature, she and her East-facing twin Ganga are dying:

Five of the ten rivers listed in the report are in Asia alone. They are the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Ganges and Indus…Even without warmer temperatures threatening to melt Himalayan glaciers, the Indus River faces scarcity due to over-extraction for agriculture. Fish populations, the main source of protein and overall life support systems for hundreds of thousands of communities worldwide, are also being threatened.(link)

In a report issued about dangers to 10 of the world’s great rivers, the WWF. Climate changes threatens the Ganges and especially the Indus with both a decrease in supply and the hazardous instability of sudden floods. The Indus basin more than 178 million people and draws as much of 80% of it’s water from Himalayan glaciers; the Ganges basin has atleast 200 million people (See Razib’s comment below). 60% of the tributaries of the Ganges are being diverted. Both rivers are the homes to their own special populations of rare freshwater dolphins—approximately 1100 Indus river dolphins and only a couple thousand Ganges Dolphins, as well as a very rare Ganges freshwater shark. The Ganges and Brahmaputra together span 10 biomes and water the last tiger inhabited mangroves. The report is available in PDF form and is well-written and well-foot-noted—it’s a concise set of geography lessons and worth reading on its own.

One of the loveliest things I ever saw in India was while crossing a branch of the Ganges in the West Bengal countryside—half a dozen dolphins jumping in coordinated arcs across the river, their tails flipping, backlit by the afternoon sun. I stood up in my amazement, rocking the boat, but I was suddenly unafraid—they were so delightful. I want my grandchildren to see them too.

Related: Drinking Water, Melting Glaciers and Climate Change, previous WWF report on Rivers.

(Updated in light of Razib’s comment.)

There is much in my life that the Holy Trilogy has taught me. I refer of course to Star Wars (the original, not the unwatchable prequels). As I make my way through this long and often chaotic journey, I know that I can always refer back to it for understanding and comfort in the face of confusion. Of course, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, Star Wars was really just a vehicle for the re-telling of the story of the Hero With a Thousand Faces:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. [Link]

The original Star Wars Trilogy featured Luke Skywalker as the Hero. The prequels featured Anakin/Darth Vader as an anti-hero. All this introduction brings me to the story of Sanjaya Malakar, the 17-year-old singer on American Idol. He is the one. The chosen one that will bring a balance to the force. The light must be completely extinguished and the darkness he represents must reign over us all, before the world can rise up and purge that which he represents once again.

Now, before I continue with my analysis I must state, again, that I don’t watch American Idol. It comes on at the same time as Pussycat Dolls Presents: The Search for the Next Doll, which I watch instead. I wish American Idol contestants were “hot like” the Dolls, but they just aren’t so it is an easy choice. I’m shallow like that.

Some xenophobic theories on the internet claim that the reason Sanjaya is winning is because all the call center workers from India are calling in and voting for him. As if they have nothing better to do (like ummmm…take incoming customer complaints through the night). Such racist filth masquerading as one man’s “theory” undermines what is really happening here. Likewise, pictures such as the one below, although they do make the proper Star Wars connection, miss the mark by thinking of Sanjaya as merely a Sith and not the Sith Lord:

Sanjaya Maul

In the past, discussions of domestic abuse have run aground because of the lack of good information. In general, we end up agreeing on three points:

• Women are assaulted by their partners in South Asia
• South Asian women are assaulted by their partners in America
• Non South Asian women are assaulted by their partners all over the world as well

but we always lack the numbers to talk about how bad the problem is in different places and for different communities. For that reason, I thought it was worth flagging this statistic I saw in the recent NEJM article on AIDS in India:

That’s more than 1 in every 3 women in India who has had a husband at some point. The numbers in the article varied by state, and unfortunately they provided these figures for only a handful of states (those where they had HIV figures). Still, here’s what it says:

I suppose if you’re going to post about Gandhi, the Jews, Nazi’s, and especially GOP Presidential candidates, you’d better expect some pretty passionate responses. After scanning the comments from the post (and yes, together with SM Intern, deleting some of the more inflammatory and personally insulting), I thought it would be interesting to spend more time on a central question — Was Gandhi Anti-Semitic when he recommended that “The Jews” “offer themselves to the butcher’s knife?”

Guiding Light or “Useful Idiot”?

The short answer is “no” but the question presents a particularly clear example of a classic political / moral divide — do we judge Gandhi’s position based on Intentions or Consequences?

Yesterday’s NYT details research which provides a bit more scientific basis to a divide philosophers have grappled with for centuries -

“…there are at least two systems working when we make moral judgments… There’s an emotional system that depends on this specific part of the brain, and another system that performs more utilitarian cost-benefit analyses…”

Gandhi’s intentions were absolutely NOT anti-Semitic. As the original post noted, “Jews were his friends”… he consistently prescribed the same strategy for Europeans as well as Indians & Jews… etc. In his heart of hearts, it’s clear from reading any of the linked material that Gandhi really did believe he was helping the Jews in the best way he knew how….. Heck, *he* probably believed he was pro-semitic. And for many, that’s the final litmus test.

The problem however, is whether good intentions let him off the hook when the consequences of his prescription are practically the perfect opposite. The glaring holes and leaps-of-faith in his policy would have undoubtedly led to an even easier extermination job for Hitler and his anti-Semitic ilk. Although it was the Soviets who took the technique to evil-brilliant heights (and to a much smaller extent, modern Jihadi’s), one can envision a hypothetical Nazi agent provocateur hired to spread Gandhi’s diatribes to the Jews (or any other Untermensch) just to speed things along. (how’s that for Machiavellian? )

So by which measure do we judge him? And how can this case be so spectacularly conflicted? Well, in part it goes back to that old Mind vs. Body debate….

Turns out there was not just one, but two desi-related films up for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars this year. I’m talking about Denmark’s After the Wedding, which will be released here in the US next week on March 30 in select cities. Don’t know how I overlooked this one back when the nominees were announced, but the late release date probably explains it.

While many films concerning Westerners in India involve characters going to the motherland to find themselves after going through some sort of a crisis (Shantaram and Darjeeling Limited come to mind), After the Wedding is different. This film deals with the emotional turmoil a Westerner goes through after he leaves India. In After the Wedding, a Danish expat, Jacob, lives in India and runs an orphanage. He also has an adopted son, Pramod, whom he’s raised since infancy. When the orphanage is threatened by closure, Jacob begrudgingly leaves India for Denmark to meet with a businessman, Jørgen, who offers to help keep the orphanage open. Jacob also discovers that a) Jørgen’s wife happens to Jacob’s ex and b) Jørgen’s daughter (gasp!) might actually be his. And so Jacob must now ask himself a difficult question: return to India and his adopted Pramod or stay in Denmark with the biological daughter he’s never known?

You can view the trailer after the jump. Is it just me or does Jacob look like he’s in excellent shape for someone who’s about to face a mid-life crisis?

In today’s NYT there is an article about a bobo couple’s experiment with low impact living in “an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue”. They’re eating only locally grown food stuffs and eschewing even spices, olive oil and vinegar because these come from further away. They’re buying only food, composting their trash, and they’ve stopped using paper. All paper. Writing paper, paper towel, and even … toilet paper. This last bit is supposed to let us know that they’re serious about their experiment:

A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there… Toothpaste is baking soda … Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying… [Link]

I’m just not impressed. Don’t get me wrong, as an ABD I like my conveniences, and I’m not willingly going give this one up. On the other hand, it just doesn’t seem like that much of a hard core thing to do. My FOB friends swear that TP is unhygienic compared to a lota; a buddy from silicon valley used to smuggle his in and out of the bathroom because he just felt … dirtier without.

For this couple, it’s all part of a stunt designed to generate a non-fiction book (he’s a writer). However, a far better place to look for hard core urban environmentalism is in the Dharavi slums of Bombay, Asia’s largest. Dharavi takes the discards of Bombay’s 19 million residents and turns it into close to $1 Billion of production a year, making it the world’s richest slum.

Have you guys seen the freaking fantastic new credit cards from VISA (thanks Eleanor)! I don’t know about you guys but I am stoked and mailing in my application as I type this post. Now, by purchasing lots of things on credit, I am actually actively working my way toward enlightenment. CO2 producing gasoline at $2.50 a gallon? Charge it. $100 bar tab? What would Buddha do? The more that the U.S. sinks into debt the more we are actually improving our collective karma. In no time at all we’ll be able to work off that whole Iraq thingy. This is so much more worthwhile than that stupid desi(RED) campaign.

It’s Everywhere you want to be!

Look, just think of it this way. You KNOW that you’ll never be able to redeem your dollars for airline miles. The airlines always screw you on that stuff by making you fly on a Wednesday at midnight. Rather than waste your time with cards that give you miles or cash back, why not use a card that will help save your eternal soul? I’m just sayin’.

…wherein Whose God is it Anyways? inspires a second cricket post in a row!

The education of my cricket-ignorant kundi continues; I shall torment you with my progress, much like a toddler rushes back to a parent to exclaim, “I did it in the potty!” Like aforementioned kid, I, too would like a cookie and a pat on the head. Thanks, you’re the best.

So. WGiiA left a comment on my last World Cup post which piqued my kitten-like curiosity:

ok. just got very emotional seeing inzi get out and leave the field for the last time in an ODI. he deserved better circumstances under which to leave. [link]

I immediately assaulted consulted one of my cricket tutors, the one who kindly told me a bedtime story via speakerphone last night which starred Sachin Tendulkar— look, when one runs out of Ambien, one reaches for desperate alternatives— and expressively typed “?” in his GChat window. I didn’t expect to like or care about what I’d learn, but I wanted to find out more nonetheless, if only because I’m a sentimental wench and anyone’s last __ always makes me a bit verklempt.

What a World Cup. And I say that as a cricket neophyte.

Stunning upsets, out-of-control fans, stocks in effigy companies spiking…and murder?

Bob Woolmer, 58, is dead. They found the unconscious coach of Pakistan’s team in his hotel room this weekend and he died soon after that at a hospital. At first, I was told by my cricket tutors that it was probably a heart attack; after a bruising defeat, it seemed entirely plausible. Woolmer’s family seemed to agree, from various reports that I had read. But what really happened to him? Did he die of unnatural causes (Thanks WGiiA, Anon and Anil)?

Police are now treating Bob Woolmer’s death as suspicious, Mark Shields, the deputy commissioner of police, told a news conference in Jamaica. A full-scale investigation has been ordered.

…”Having met with the pathologists, our medical personnel and investigators, there is now sufficient information to continue a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Mr Woolmer, which we are now treating as suspicious.”

However, unconfirmed reports suggested Woolmer might have been murdered because marks were found around his neck. [Link]

Hmmmm. I’ll keep you posted. Well, you’ll probably keep ME posted, but you know what I meant. The education of this dilettante cricket fan continues…and really, it doesn’t need to be THIS interesting.

Siddhartha’s post on lovely lime pickle got me thinking about my favorite. Behold: The Amazing Ambarella!

Before

After

Other names for this fruit and close relatives are Otaheite apple, Tahitian quince, Jamaica plum, golden apple and wi…The tree grows tall, reaching almost 20 m (60 ft). The fruit, which is popular in Asia, is plum shaped, sweet-sour and eaten at all stages of ripeness. Its distinguishing feature is a spiny seed. The spines toughen as the fruit matures, so that when eating conserve made from the almost-ripe fruit, the sweet flesh should be carefully sucked from the seed to avoid an unsolicited lip-piercing or a tough fibre stuck between the teeth. In the unripe stages the green skin is peeled with a knife and slices of the firm, pale flesh dipped in chilli powder and salt before being relished by street-side snackers or school children. Unripe fruit is also cooked in chutneys. As the fruit ripens it becomes yellow to orange in colour and more fragrant and sweet, though still with a good percentage of acidity. It has been described as having a flavour like pineapple.link

I don’t think it tastes like a pineapple at all, but the rest of it is pretty accurate. I’ve never seen ambarellas for sale anywhere in the U.S. and the web didn’t have much except for these odd little facts:

• The word”Ambarella” is Sinhalese, ultimately from Sanskrit
• The Dutch seem to be remarkably interested in it
• The bark of the tree can be used to cure diarrhoea
• Some hi-def tech company apparently decided to one-up Apple in the fruity brand identity sweepstakes

In Sri Lanka, ambarellas are made into chutneys, curries, and pickles of all kinds. Cut a raw one up, sprinkle a little salt, sugar, vinegar and chili powder…oooh, heaven. My grandmother had a gigantic tree growing right over her house, and we’d visit her carrying buckets during the fruiting season. I’ve got strangely happy memories of eating peeled, uncut ambarella while reading a book, only noticing my bleeding gums (those spines are shaarrp) when my mother grimaced.

So does anyone else have memories of eating an ambarella? Maybe you call it by another name? Or (and this would be fabulous) you know where I could buy some?!

My friend Ansour forwarded me this story from the LA Times on a group of Indian guest workers in the Gulf Coast. Signal International, a marine and fabrication company with shipyards in Texas and Mississippi, hired approximately 300 laborers from India as welders and pipe fitters in Mississippi under a guest worker program. In addition to decent wages, Signal allegedly promised good accommodations and steps to permanent US residency to its guest workers. But some of these workers have protested that Signal did not live up to any of its promises, and that they’ve been subjected to “slave” conditions.

Sabulal Vijayan of Kerala, for example, said that upon arriving to Mississippi, he discovered that the “good” accommodations promised by Signal were actually quite horrible:

“We were like pigs in a cage,” he said. His living quarters were cramped bunk houses where two dozen laborers shared two bathrooms.

It is too hard to live there, because somebody is sneezing, somebody is snoring, and somebody is making sound, and we cannot even go to bathroom without spending hours. There is only two bathrooms and four toilets. And we are struggling very well. And in the mess hall we are not getting good food even. And they are saying that this is Indian good. And when we make complain, the camp manager said to us that, “You are living in slums in India. It is better than that slums.”

The company cut the workers’ wages from $1,850 a week to $1,350 or $950, depending on the position, Vijayan said. When he and other workers complained, they were fired without notice.

“I cannot go back to India because I cannot pay my debt,” Vijayan said of the money he borrowed to pay recruiters. He was so distraught that he recently slashed his wrist in a suicide attempt. His left arm is still bandaged.

Up until today it seemed that by 2009 the United States would have its first Indian American Governor in Piyush “Bobby” Jindal of Louisiana. You can read my most recent entry about it here. No more. Jindal went from a shoe-in to what some might consider an underdog in the span of a single day. Via Politico:

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) announced she’s not running for re-election this evening at the state Capitol, setting the stage for former Sen. John Breaux (D) to enter the race.

“I am choosing to do what is best for my state. I will focus my time and energy on the people’s work, not politics. After much prayer, I have decided I will not seek reelection as your governor,” said Blanco in her address at the governor’s mansion.

Breaux is currently asking the state attorney general for an opinion on his residency status. Though Breaux represented Louisiana in the House and Senate from 1973-2005, he remained in the Washington area since leaving Congress. He currently lives in Maryland, and serves as senior counsel for the prestigious law firm and lobbying shop Patton Boggs. [Link]

Breaux is the former (popular) Democrat senator from Louisiana (although he often voted like a Republican). With him entering the race, Jindal’s lock on the governor’s mansion is shattered.

Breaux issued a statement following Blanco’s speech: “I join other Louisianians in thanking Governor Blanco for her many years of public service to the people of our state, the last couple under extremely difficult circumstances. I wish her the very best over the rest of her term, and in the future as she enjoys spending time with her family and pursuing other opportunities.”

Blanco was widely criticized for her response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and her popularity had not recovered since the storm. GOP Rep. Bobby Jindal, who narrowly lost to Blanco in 2003, has already begun his campaign

A January Southern Media and Opinion Research poll showed him leading Blanco by 24 points, 59-34 percent. [Link]

Let me re-phrase Breaux’s statement: “Blanco sucks and is resigning because she wouldn’t even be able to beat a corpse in 2008.” Now it is either “Breaux” or “Jindal.” It is the favorite son vs. the guy who has been laying a lot of groundwork for the last few years. The Swing State Project opines on what Jindal’s new strategy might be:

With Blanco out and John Breaux presumably announcing his candidacy within the next few days, at the very least, Louisiana Democrats are buying an extra inning to hold on to the state. At best, Breaux’s entry will be exactly what’s needed to throw a monkey wrench in hard-right Republican Rep. Bobby Jindal’s longtime gubernatorial ambitions. Expect a lot of mud to be hurled at Breaux about how he’s “gone Washington” and lived out of state for a couple of years. It won’t be easy, but I think we can all agree that Breaux’s chances, even with one hand tied behind his back due to his residency issues, are a heck of a lot better than those of a damaged Kathleen Blanco. [Link]

Behold: The lime pickle. Not the chili pickle, the mango pickle, the garlic pickle, the eggplant pickle, or any other kind of pickle. And certainly not that abomination, the “mixed pickle.” This here is lime pickle, the greatest and more exalted of all the pickles.

Man, me and lime pickle go back a long, long way. You see, in all my mixed-up, tri-continental, ruthlessly secular upbringing, desi food always held its rightful place. Now we lived in France, not a major center of desi culture either then or now, and this was before the globalization of so-called ethnic gourmet cuisine made the basic spices and ingredients available in all the world’s major cities. But we made do, and the key to our survival, desi food-wise, was the one line of prepared foods, spice mixes and achars on the market, which was inevitably Patak’s. So there was always a bottle of curry paste around — not to serve as the sole ingredient, of course, but to accelerate the process. And whether the curry was prepared from a paste or from scratch, there was always lime pickle on hand to give it the necessary je ne sais quoi.

To this day lime pickle is one of the essential condiments in my refrigerator — that and Dijon mustard (the proper smooth kind, not the grainy stuff), a combination that I guess pretty much encapsulates the flavors of my childhood. I find uses for lime pickle that other people don’t have — or so I think. Except I know that now, as I confess to you that I add lime pickle to my tuna fish salad, a whole bunch of you are going to reveal that you do the same.

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a short “perspective” piece on the state of HIV/AIDS in India. This is the first article in what appears to be a series, the next one is on the challenges involved in containing HIV in India. Here are a few points from the piece:

We don’t know how many people have HIV in India

The best estimate right now is 5.7 million HIV infected Indians, that’s one in every eight cases world wide (India has one in every six people in the world). However, there is a great deal of uncertainty around this number:

The epidemiologic data for India (estimates of the number of infected persons range from 3.4 million to 9.4 million) are far less precise than for South Africa … In 2005, no data were available for many of India’s more than 600 districts. [Link]

See the image to the right? The data come from the National AIDS Control Organization. The northern states are all blank because there isn’t enough data. That’s really distressing.

Estimates indicate that rates are not (yet?) high in the general population:

The estimated HIV prevalence among people 15 to 49 years old in India is 0.5 to 1.5%, whereas in South Africa it is 16.8 to 20.7%. [Link]

But higher in high risk subgroups:

Female and male sex workers, men who have sex with men, and injection-drug users have the highest rates of infection — surveys typically find a prevalence of 10 to 20%…. [Link]

Prevention faces many hurdles, especially amongst women:

Across India as a whole, only 35% of women know that consistent condom use can reduce the risk of infection. However, since 37% of women who have been married at one point have experienced sexual abuse, not all women have much leverage to negotiate.

So, towards the end of my essay on acceptance, a commenter thoughtfully asked me to clarify what I meant by mentioning the fact that Nina Paley had lived in Kerala more recently than I had even visited it. Here’s what I said, which prompted her inquiry:

Nina has been to Kerala far more recently than I have; my last visit was back in the dark ages of 1989. In fact, she lived there, which is something I’ll probably never be able to claim. Who the hell am I or anyone else for that matter, to pull rank over that?

Did Nina’s stay in my parents’ home state give her carte blanche? No, of course it doesn’t. When I said that I wasn’t going to “pull rank”, I meant that I was going to acknowledge that others, even white others, might be more familiar with what everyone expects me to be an expert on, and because of that, I especially loathe the idea of playing the race card, i.e. I am desi, therefore I know more about (and/or get to restrict the unbrown from) my culture. If you read my post, you’ll know that I have a very intimate and poignant reason for why the part I italicized resonates with me.

I appreciate that Nagasai and Amitabh both opened a respectful dialogue about how they feel about Nina’s art but I also am known to be a fan of keeping threads on-topic, so I thought I’d spin this discussion off in to its own separate post, because the issues at play here are fascinating and significant.

What does Nina’s artwork mean to you?

What role does race play in all of this— how many of us would have the same issues we do if her name were Nina Patel vs. Nina Paley?

And how far do these “rules” go? Do some of you have a problem with the fact that I’m writing this post (i.e. that I’m a Christian, commenting on the appropriateness of Hindu imagery in art)? Inquiring and potentially bored mutineers want to know!

Cricket mania in India has produced a new Indian superhero, ‘Sachin Tendulkar - the Master Blaster’:

India’s Sachin Tendulkar is set to appear as a superhero in a new range of comic books, animation and games. The cricketing legend has linked up with Virgin Comics and his character will wear body armour and wield a flaming cricket bat. [Link]

Ummmm …. guys? You’re not helping the rep of desi men any. He’s short, has a stiff bat on fire, and is associated with Virgin? Great … But wait, it gets even better:

… two years ago had a stage musical about him called Main Sachin Tendulkar [Link]

Just imagine little Rajiv, playing in an American sandbox with his Sachin Tendulkar action figure.

Joe: I’ve got a GI Joe! What’s that short geeky looking thing?
Rajiv: I’ve got a Sachin Tendulkar! He plays cricket!
Joe: GI Joe has a gun. See, he can shoot bad guys with it.
Rajiv: Sachin has a flaming cricket bat! And when I play, I sing songs from his musical. Isn’t he awesome?

Doesn’t Gotham Chopra know how many years of therapy poor Rajiv is going to have to pay for?

A banned commenter left the following pain on a thread yesterday:

I cannot stand it when black or hispanic women try to get into the “bollywood” trend. They are so superficially involved with indian culture and dont know shit about the true meaning/history behind why things are done. I doubt they have any respect for the indian culture; they just like the trendy-cool look of things.

I didn’t delete it, nor did I summon the intern to stop fanning me as I lounged on my throne, to do so at my behest. I was too overwhelmed, at how in much the same way a smell can invoke a memory consummately and instantly, bigotry could, too.

Reading the bitter words in that comment sliced my age in half with the precision of my Mother’s Wusthof carving knife; once my eyes left my laptop screen, I was sixteen again and utterly miserable. It was a Sunday morning, just after church, during the coffee hour, and I was waiting for my Father to finish chatting with one of his acquaintances, a local professor named Dr. Pappas whom he didn’t get to see regularly.

I never felt entirely at home at church, because I was Indian and it was Greek. Though my parents both come from indefatigable Malankara Syriac Orthodox bloodlines, my sister and I were not baptized in the church of our ancestors. The reason for this sounds droll when I narrate it, after I am inevitably asked why I’m Greek Orthodox; personally, however, it is borderline painful, as it created a chasm between me and other Malayalees which can never be closed. I find it bitterly amusing that the only time I was ever “confused” as an American-born desi was when I was trying to reconcile who I was as an Orthodox Christian.

For those of you who missed it, there was a groundbreaking study out of Texas last week:

The traditional theory of beauty says that for every man who chases the voluptuous type, such as Jordan or Marilyn Monroe, there is another who prefers to woo a waif such as Twiggy or Kate Moss.

But this and the idea that beauty is subjective and ever-changing has been overturned by Prof Devendra Singh and his daughter Adrian Singh…

The psychologists from the University of Texas today publish research showing that lovestruck men have only one thing on their minds: a woman’s WHR - waist-hip ratio, calculated by dividing waist circumference by that of the hips.

Jordan and Twiggy have something in common: both have waists that are noticeably narrower than their hips and Prof Singh has found evidence this “belle curve” is ingrained in the male brain in his studies of Playboy centrefolds, the ancient Egyptians and tests on men from Africa to the Azores. [Link]

Ok, I know this is science but…eeeww. If I had a daughter I wouldn’t want to be looking through stacks of Playboy magazines with her, even if it was for the good of science (which I normally support). Anecdotally, I know these two have hit upon the correct theory. Just this past weekend I leaned over to a friend and mentioned that I was totally “crushing on that girl’s WHR.”

The team also found the hourglass in ancient literature. Two ancient Indian epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana (first to third century), and Chinese sixth dynastic Palace poetry also link attractiveness with a wasp waist.

Consider, for instance, the description by Chinese writer Xu Ling (507-583): “Beautiful women in the palace of Chu, there were none who did not admire their slender waist; the fair woman of Wei.” Similarly, the Mahabharata contains the description: “accept this slender-waisted damsel for thy spouse…” [Link]

Hot-off-the-press (so hot that it won’t even be available until July) is a book whose subject matter seems to tackle some of the same topics we often post on this site, as well as might contain some good explanations as to why our website sometimes attracts bigotry/ignorance of a certain persuasion. The book is titled, A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism. The book is by author Prema A. Kurien (who I see has been denounced in some way or another on a smattering of websites). Indolink reports:

According to its publisher Rutgers University Press, the book offers an in-depth look at Hinduism in the United States and the Hindu Indian American community.

The book focuses on understanding the private devotions, practices, and beliefs of Hindu Americans as well as their political mobilization and activism. And it probes the differences between immigrant and American-born Hindu Americans, how both understand their religion and their identity, while it emphasizes the importance of the social and cultural context of the United States in influencing the development of an American Hinduism…

Drawing on the experiences of both immigrant and American-born Hindus, Kurien demonstrates how religious ideas and practices are being imported, exported, and reshaped in the process. The result of this transnational movement, according to Kurien, is an American Hinduism- an organized, politicized, and standardized version of that which is found in India.

The book explains that Hinduism has undergone several modifications in interpretation, practice, and organization in the United States in the process of being institutionalized as an American religion. Kurien argues that while Hindu American spokespersons espouse a genteel pluralism and attempt to use Hinduism to secure a place at the American multicultural table, they also use the ideology of multiculturalism to justify and legitimize a militant Hindu nationalism. Drawing on this contradiction, she develops a theoretical model to explain 1) why multiculturalism often seems to exacerbate émigré nationalism, and 2) why religion is often involved directly or indirectly in this process. [Link]

Via Uberdesi, your home for American Idol-related everything.

What perfect timing— some of us were just talking about both Sanjaya AND the utility of hunger strikes! I’d write more but I’m rolling on the floor, laughing my callipygian rondure off.

Last week, the Daily News (thanks Dave) had a fascinating article about Deevani, the Hindi singer on the Daddy Yankee hit “Mirame”. Details about this singer were always shrouded in mystery, at least until she granted her first interview and cleared up the fact that Deevani (née Adalgisa Inés Rooney) was actually not Indian or even South Asian at all, but a Puerto Rico raised Dominican who fell in love with her first husband’s Bengali language and culture.

Normally I’d want to snark all over something like this. But I can’t. The woman is just too impressive. I think she’s single now, so let me pass on her biodata:

• She is a 31-year-old mother of 3 kids
• She has an MBA in finance
• She is the CEO of her brother’s (Luny, of superproducing duo Luny Tunes) company Mas Flow
• She taught herself eight languages - Chinese, Japanese, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi and Arabic. So with her native Spanish, and English, that makes ten.
• In an industry crammed with female “divas” and all the cliches that the term engenders, she is refreshingly comfortable presenting a low-key, domestic image:

  “I’ve just written this song for [new artist] Nicolle,” she says, passing her iPod across the table. “The melody came to me when I was dusting my house.”

Ughhhrrr…on most mornings, I’m lucky if I can find a pair of black tights without holes, and leave the house with my glasses still on my face. And she records hit songs while she’s dusting. F*ck! Maybe I need to step it up a little…

Rooney also appears to be a driving force behind the electrifying (should be if “Mirame” was just a teaser) Bhangra-Reggaeton fusion known as Bhangraton:

It is a picture that I imagine many who read this blog have a variation of in one form or another. You know, that image of the the nuclear desi-American family— returned to the sub-Continent for a long (summer) vacation— of mom, dad, brother, sister posing in front of the Taj Mahal. The group is huddled close on that bench hoping for the perfect portrait. And really, how can the picture be bad? That grand marble monument towering in the background, its skewed reflection glimmering in the rectangular pond. Observing that familiar image reflected on the movie screen and understanding that feeling of closeness and comfort of being together in a foreign place, put a big smile on my face, as did most of Mira Nair’s latest film The Namesake.

I know we’ve previously blogged a review of the film, but this was a very personal book for me, I think for most of us. I even made my mom, who doesn’t usually read “English novels” read the book, and she loved it. So I think the movie merits more than just one review. In any case, I’ll do my best not to repeat too many of the things cicatrix mentioned earlier, and promise to stay away from the word timepass. The film was “just too good yar,” to merit the use of the word to describe it.

I find it hard to have high expectations for movies based on books. I have been burned too many times. With that in mind, my expectations for the movie were upward leaning, but not over reaching. I didn’t know how Nair could add visuals to a novel that was for me already so vivid. As the stunning opening credits blurred between Bengali and English, I immediately knew Lahiri’s story was in good hands. Nair and her longtime collaborator Sooni Taraporevala’s treatment stayed true to the novel while also providing an original point of view. Their take does a fine job of including the highlights of the book, but in their attempt to hit all the major points, the movie misses some of the extras that made the story so poignant. (Warning: Spoiler Alert, especially if you haven’t read the book)

The inclusion of the Ashima and Ashoke’s early years was good, but I wanted to see more of their early married life, more of Ashima’s struggle adjusting to life in America. To life without her family. To life without the familiar. I wanted to see her overcome that struggle, and grow into her life in America, as we saw in the novel. I think that is an important part of the story, and not spending enough time on some of these nuances took away from the story’s gravitas. The significance of the late night/early morning phone call for example, how was the audience supposed to know that odd-timed phone calls only meant significant news from India, usually bad?

I don’t need to tell y’all that brown people are taking over the world. Hell, desis been taking over for a minute now. One place where you would have thought this would be apparent is here in New York City, where our people are running things across the board, from academia to media to cinema to art to finance to medicine to law to activism to philanthropy to — oh, yeah, fruit vendors and taxi cab drivers (but we do not speak of these). And yet, there remains a class of benighted New Yorkers who have yet to recognize the ever-browning brownitude in which they bathe.

Who are these poor souls? Why, they’re the readers of the New York Observer: the pink-papered weekly with the highbrow preoccupations and the arch headlines and the Upper West Side noblesse oblige; the original fount of the Candace Bushnell column that begat Sex and the City; the paper that crows to advertisers that it “delivers the top of the market: a well-educated, affluent audience of highly influential consumers.” Indeed, according to the sales kit, median household income among Observer subscribers is $162,500; median net worth is $1,546,200; the average numbers are much higher.

Well, in what must be confirmation that we have finally arrived, this lofty set has been officially advised of our existence as of the current issue of the Observer, which features a series of short profiles penned by Nicholas Boston, under the (highly original!) title “India, Inc.” The reduction to India of a group that actually mixes FOBs (or whatever we’re calling them now), ABDs, 1.5s, and people of Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani and even half-Dutch origin is but one of the various conflations that y’all sensitive types might bridle at but that, let’s face it, shouldn’t really matter all that much given that we all look the same.

Anyway, now that we exist, at least as some kind of highly literate brown blob, we also need a name. What would it be? Desicrats? Macacarati? No! We are… the Bollypolitans! “A Bollypolitan elite is the newest creative class to kick into New York with art, fashion, literature,” the subtitle announces. And in the first sentence we meet our leader:

In 2000, the Indian-American Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with The Interpreter of Maladies, making her the first South Asian—and, at 33, among the youngest of any ethnicity—to be named in that category. She appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, wearing crimson, her hair gelled back into a chignon.

Charlie Rose! Crimson! Chignons! Shit, this desi thing must be for real. Indeed:

Ever since then, twenty- and thirtysomethings of South Asian descent—that would be Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan—have emerged in a very public way on New York’s cultural stage, and we’re not talkin’ Kaavya Viswanathan. Art centers have been chartered, dance ensembles formed, fashion companies founded—and many more books, both fiction and nonfiction, written and published. Herewith, some names to learn.

So, quick: If you had to pick 12 desis-you-need-to-know in the New York “creative class” (and don’t pick Cicatrix or myself, that would be too easy :P), who would you choose? You can compare your results with Mr. Boston’s incredible advanced sociological sampling analysis here. Discuss!

Former Senator, occasional actor, and potential GOP presidential contender Fred D. Thompson recently delivered a radio address titled “Gandhi’s Way isn’t the American Way” (mp3 here; transcript here).

To Be or Not To Be, That Is the Question

..At what point is it okay to fight dictators like Saddam or the al Qaeda terrorists who want to take his place?

It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER. During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.”

There’s an old saying that had the Brits been Nazi’s, Gandhi would’ve been a lampshade. Macabre as the humor might be, it underscores a key reason for Gandhi’s success with passive, non-violent resistance - it depends on your opponent’s moral code as much as your own. The problem here however, paraphrasing Thompson, is that Gandhi’s enemies aren’t America’s enemies.

Still, Gandhi’s direct statements about the Jews was a bit startling to me and worth some googling around…

Another They’d be dead but at least they’d have the moral high ground…guy who was also likely surprised by Gandhi’s determination to prescribe his strategy to the bitter end (well, for the Jews at least) was one Louis Fisher. He asked Gandhi to clarify his position which he did rather unequivocally -

Louis Fisher, Gandhi’s biographer asked him: “You mean that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?”

Gandhi responded, “Yes, that would have been heroism.”

If Nature made it, it’s gotta be Good, right? “Charles Darwin found the grisly life histories of Ichneumons incompatible with the central notion of natural theology…”

It’s clear that when considering the age old problem of mind-body duality, Gandhi entirely favors the mind at the expense of recklessly discarding the body. Sticks and stones may break his bones but homey’s still not gonna give you the time of day and that’ll make you, his enemy, sad. Eventually. But perhaps only after 6 millionth casualty. Or if you run out of sticks & stones.

“Evil” in his sense thus comes from too much application of volition via the body and not enough going with the flow of nature. And in this orgy of nihilism, Gandhi found nobility and a “joyful sleep” which he implored the Jews to partake in -

…suffering voluntarily undergone will bring [Jews] an inner strength and joy….if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving..to the godfearing death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

Lest we accuse Gandhi of anti-semitism we must first note that, in a manner echoed by our modern day Mel Gibson’s and Michael Richards’, Gandhi assures us that not only does he sympathize with the Jews, but that some of his best friends are Jewish -

My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became life-long companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age-long persecution.

…didn’t believe Ichnuemons existed in Human Nature too…

“I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions…

“If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman and child to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”

Oh yeah. Let the Gestapo torture & kill you but refuse to owe them allegiance. That’ll show ‘em. Needless to say, you can put me on Fred Thompson’s side on this particular debate.

Still, the world does occasionally need Gandhi and his modern-day sign-toting adherents…. Putting aside their well-intentioned blinders towards human nature, I agree that peace more than has its place as does a firm aversion to the carnage of war. I just wish they’d put more energy into getting their message in front of these guys first.

Wot’s this?? Apparently, boycandy Sreesanth will not be part of India’s opening line-up at the World Cup (damn you, Khan, Agarkar and Patel…damn you all!).

Paceman Shanthakumaran Sreesanth looks likely to miss out on a starting place for the World Cup but said that could be the best thing to happen for him.

…”I like it this way,” he said at a team net practice near Port-of-Spain on Wednesday. “I like to struggle and get something rather than get it easily. I’m sure I will get the opportunity.”[Reuters]

I dig a good chase too, but if my sweet little neyyappam ain’t playin’, suddenly, I am way less inspired to impersonate Mandira Bedi poorly. Many of you might recall that my fling with Cricket commenced with a post which celebrated Sreesanth’s glorious obnoxiousness towards Andre Nel:

After hearing about Mallu hotness Sreesanth (thanks, DTK), I had to visit ye olde YouTube to find out about this right-arm fast-medium-pace bowler, who is a right-handed tailender. Apparently, excessively lippy South African Andre Nel questioned Sreesanth’s heart/courage/skillz after Sreesanth evaded something called a bouncer. Sreesanth responded by hitting Nel for a six and then performing a dance I’d normally associate with an end zone. Oh, that was just brutal to write. I can’t imagine how many men I’ve just annoyed. ;)

I may not know a damned thing about what is arguably the most popular sport in all of South Asia, but I know the art of trash talk well and if anything could get me to fall in love with this very Brown game, it’s the video I’ve posted…[SM, biatches!]

…

In the very interesting New York Times article that Naina discusses below, about relations between African-American and immigrant Muslims in the city, virtually all the immigrant voices are desi and Arab, with scarcely a mention of the city’s growing African Muslim community from countries like Senegal, Guinee, Ivory Coast and Mali. The lack of mention felt a bit odd coming in an article published at the very same time that the city was reeling from a major tragedy that put West African Muslims front and center in local news.

As many of you know there was an accidental fire in a house in the Bronx last Wednesday night that killed ten people, nine of them children, all from an extended family from Mali. Excluding 9/11, it’s the greatest loss of life in such an event in the city since the nightclub fire in 1990 that decimated another immigrant group, the Garifuna. There has been quite an outpouring of support in the city, from public officials, churches, synagogues, and businesses: for instance, the New York Yankees are covering expenses for the five victims who have been buried in the U.S., while Air France was covering repatriation of the five other bodies to Mali.

I’ve spent much of the past few days covering the story for work, and attended community gatherings in the Bronx and Harlem over the weekend and also the funeral on Monday, at the Islamic Cultural Center on East 166th St. in the Bronx that has served as the mourning and family gathering headquarters since the fire. On Monday afternoon several thousand people packed the low, storefront-ish masjid and the streets outside to mourn and pray as the eight hearses pulled up and the ten small, plain wood caskets were unloaded for a brief service. The crowd was mostly West African but there were Latino and African-American people present too, along with a host of public officials. Mali’s foreign minister flew in on Saturday, and ambassadors from other African countries paid respects as well.

It’s a sidebar to the main story, but there was a desi angle here that really struck me. There is a lot of talk in situations like these about the affected community coming together in solidarity, which they very much have — in a moving, almost beautiful way. And there is also much talk about the city uniting, “ordinary New Yorkers” pitching in money and other support, and all of this too is very much true. What can get a little lost in the narrative is how much inter-immigrant solidarity we also witness at times like these.

There’s a really interesting article in the New York Times on the “uneasy” coalition that’s building between African American and immigrant Muslims in post-9/11 New York. Although I’m generally cynical of articles that tout people of color solidarity, I found this one to be fairly realistic and yet uplifting at the same time.

One interesting fact that I learned from the article is that of the estimated six million Muslims who live in the United States, more than a third are desis. About 25 percent of American Muslims are African-American, and 26 percent are Arab. Unsurprisingly, there’s been little cohesion between the African American and immigrant Muslim communities. The article explains that some of the decades-long tension is based on class:

Many Muslim immigrants came to the United States with advanced degrees and quickly prospered, settling in the suburbs. For decades, African-Americans watched with frustration as immigrants sent donations to causes overseas, largely ignoring the problems of poor Muslims in the United States.

Aqilah Mu’Min [an African American], lives in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, a heavily Bangladeshi neighborhood. Whenever she passes women in head scarves, she offers the requisite Muslim greeting. Rarely is it returned. “We have a theory that says Islam is perfect, human beings are not,” said Ms. Mu’Min.

Shilpa Shetty blah blah racism blah reality show winner blah. ;)

…Shilpa was in London to meet Elizabeth II at Commonweath Day on Monday, celebrated at Westminster Abbey.

The actress delivered a speech on — you guessed it — racism.

Shilpa — reportedly wearing an intricate purple velvet Tarun Tahiliani sherwani — curtseyed before the Queen, and then almost slipped in her high heels. Apparently Prince Philip smilingly told her to be careful about the shoes, averting the fall. [linkypoo]

In other news, yesterday, Pakistan should have stuck with spinners, but decided otherwise. ;)

In other other news, Since I don’t talk cricket walk cricket and laugh cricket, I have no clue what the previous statement involving Pakistan means. I’m just shamelessly flirting with all you cricket-fiends.

Finally, for those of you who might be wondering why on earth I posted this if I was obviously sooo not interested in it, it’s really just because I thought sherwanis were for boys and I wanted to consult my kitchen cabinet. Well?

Over the last three years SM has slowly gained in readership, and other news sources and blogs often link to us. These links are one part of the formula that search engines like Google use to rank pages for relevance. That means that very often when you search for a desi related story, celebrity, etc., you’ll end up here at our humble site. Sometimes the people we write about love that fact! It is free publicity for them from a source whose intelligent (yes you!) readership they $value$. Other times we get celebrities threatening to sue us for embarrassing them (see our FAQ as to how we respond to those emails). I won’t mention which celebrities save one. Indian born fashion designer, Anand Jon.

Almost two years ago our Anna, a fan of ANTM, mentioned him in a blog post. In fact, she quoted from an article over at Nirali Magazine (link is broken) in which former ANTM contestant Julie Ann Titus made some rather disparaging comments about Mr. Jon. Here is a quote by Ms. Titus from Anna’s post:

I respect him as a fashion designer. But he was very, very rude to some of the girls. He seemed so boring to me. I asked him what part of India he was from, and he asked me, what part of India are you from? So I said I’m from Kerala, and he looked at me kind of crazy. He’s Malayalee , too. He asked me if I knew any Malayalam, and I said I only knew the bad words. Then he says, “Shouldn’t you be serving us or something?” [Titus and the other cast members had to serve four of the girls who won that week’s model challenge.] So I walked away, cursing at him in Malayalam. He said, “Oh, so now you know it?” And he smelled bad. The girls looked at me and were like, are all Indian guys like this? And I was like, nope, just this fool right here. Later, my parents told me that they know him through family friends.

Well, it turns out that one of the top Google hits on “Anand Jon” was our site…describing how he smells bad. “Jon,” or someone pretending to be him emailed us about a year ago, begging that Anna’s post be deleted. His mother had seen it and people were unfairly talking smack about his sister as well. Anna would have none of it. If a celebrity can’t take a little bad press then they shouldn’t be celebrities Anna gently (and correctly) explained to me. Always trying to be a good boy however, I told Anand that we would not delete Anna’s post but I would delete some of the especially nasty comments that followed the post, corroborating that he did in fact smell (allegedly). Partly as a joke however, I told him that he had to prove he was the real Anand Jon and not a prankster. “How,” Jon asked. Well, I once saw a movie starring Russell Crowe as an ex-SAS soldier whose new job was to become a hostage/ransom negotiator, and if need be, a hostage rescuer. When a person is kidnapped the first thing you do is to ask the kidnappers for “Proof of Life.” Typically, this is a picture of the victim holding the day’s newspaper. That way you know he/she is still alive. Since I’ve always thought of myself as a bit Russell Crowe-ish (Gladiator not Insider), I asked Jon for very specific “Proof of Life,” before I would delete the nasty comments. See below:

Anand Jon, posing with the day’s news. That is SEPIA MUTINY on his screen.

Now, I promised Jon that I wouldn’t post this picture of him reading his favorite website, and I know I will burn in the fiery pits of Mt. Doom for this. But…we here at SM can confidently say that allegedly smelling bad is no longer the worst of Mr. Jon’s problems. See after the jump.

Hello, I’m Namrata, a new contributor. I broke into the North Dakota headquarters a few months ago and ANNA decreed I was too small to be kicked out into the winter cold. When it warmed up everyone had gotten used to me, so finally Abhi and Ennis said I might as well earn my keep since I keep stealing their magazines out of the mailbox. One of the ones I like to steal is New Scientist, and there was some sad news from the desh in the latest issue:

Last month Abdul Ghani Khan, a senior Pakistani doctor, was killed by a remote-controlled bomb shortly after urging villagers to vaccinate their children. [link]

According to the Daily Times of Pakistan Dr. Khan was killed in Bajur Agency after trying to convince addressing a convening local jirga, or council; he was greeted angrily in an area where opposition to the vaccine has spread by word of mouth and radio sermon.

“As soon as we reached there, an armed prayer leader warned us against visiting the area. Some locals said: ‘On one hand, our enemy (a reference to the United States) is bombing us for no reason while on the other hand you are coming here disguised as polio campaigners to spread vulgarity,” [an injured companion of Dr. Khan] told Daily Times at the hospital. (link)

This last weekend saw the Indo-Guyanese Phagwah/Holi celebration in the neighborhood of Richmond Hills, Queens. It’s a big deal:

The Phagwah parade in Richmond Hill is one of the biggest celebrations in North America. If it’s a warm day, some 25,000 people are expected to join the 2007 parade, according to reports. [Link]

Of course things were a bit different than they were in Guyana. Here you can only get messy in a designated area, not on the street:

Freedom in Guyana means color everywhere. In Queens, powders and dyes are restricted to the park. During the parade, police officers eyed the crowd warily, ready to confiscate bottles and packets of the rule breakers, of whom there were many. [Link]

Even this restricted celebration is a compromise on the city’s part. At one point,

… the city threatened to cancel the parade fearing that someone could introduce anthrax into the Johnson’s Baby Powder (the city did not say why someone capable of producing weaponized anthrax by the bucketful would want to kill a bunch of Guyanese). Richmond Hill community leaders protested, and a compromise was reached: people marching in the parade could douse each other but not the spectators along the route. [Link - note, that’s Preston!]

Using fears of anthrax in baby powder to forbid phagwah is around as reasonable as using fears that terrorists will spike green dye with toxins to forbid St. Paddy’s day. I’m glad somebody was able to talk the NYPD down from that ledge.

Preston has some great photos from the 2004 celebration, including the one below. You can see photos of this year’s celebration at the NYT.

A great OpEd quoted (in full?) at the IndianEconomy blog talks about the “Unknown Education Revolution” in India -

Ain’t IIT But It Gets the Job Done

Walking around the hot summer streets of Sangam Vihar—Delhi’s largest slum colony sprawled over 150 acres and home to 4 lakh people—in 2005, Aditi Bhargava noticed that almost every street had a school…These schools were often just holes in the wall or a room with a few benches populated by eager children.

And in case you’re wondering if these schools are any good -

Studies carried out in India all share the common conclusion that private-school students outperform their government-school counterparts. For example, in a 2005 Delhi study [11], James Tooley found that children in low-budget unrecognized private schools did 246% better than government school children on a standardized English test, with around 80% higher average marks in mathematics and Hindi…more than 80% of government-school teachers send their own children to a private school…

As noted in an earlier post about private education in India, when it comes to capitalism the poor often have much to teach the rich. In this particular case, the lessons from the piece seem directly targeted at some of the biggest dogmas which dominate education reform debates here in the US.

Wicked Google-y, originally uploaded by suitablegirl.

…just like most of you do. Me? I heart Google Doodles, those logo variations which Googler Dennis Hwang wittily creates to celebrate holidays or significant events. It takes very little to thrill me. Close your mouth, darling…flies will make a home there…that and it’s not polite to be so shocked. ;)

This doodle wasn’t on the Amreekan search page (desi, please*), oh no. Obviously it was on Google.co.uk as well as Google’s Indian page. Interestingly enough (though I’m sure there will be a hugely obvious reason as to “why” which I will be edified with via comments in, oh, four or five minutes) Google’s pages for Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were not so festive.

Since I famously and rather foolishly promised to attempt to cover the World Cup, I thought I’d commence this mutinous cricket mania with an easy post; besides, my cricket tutors have all been wayyy too busy to field my frantic and stupid questions. ;)

In California, the Times reports that the School Board unanimously voted last week to alter a seventh grade textbook image relating to Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion (or panth), after protests from the Sikh community (thanks, Chick Pea).

The controversial image isn’t the big one pictured, but the small one (I’ve added a circle to make it clearer). The image is a 19th century painting of Guru Nanak wearing a crown and what looks like a somewhat cropped beard. Both the crown and the beard shape are troubling to Sikhs, who are accustomed to seeing images of Guru Nanak more along the lines of the bigger image to the right — flowing white beard, and humble attire.

Though the New York Times has helpful interviews with community members on this, the Contra Costa Times actually spells out the issue more clearly:

The image is taken from a 19th-century painting made after Muslims ruled India. The publisher used it because it complies with the company’s policy of using only historical images in historical texts, said Tom Adams, director of curriculum for the Department of Education.

After Sikhs complained that the picture more closely reflected a Muslim man than a Sikh, Oxford offered to substitute it with an 18th-century portrait showing Guru Nanak with a red hat and trimmed beard. But Sikhs said that picture made their founder look like a Hindu.

The publisher now wants to scrap the picture entirely from the textbook, which was approved for use in California classrooms in 2005. There are about 250,000 Sikhs in California.

Sikh leaders say they want a new, more representative image of Guru Nanak, similar to the ones they place in Sikh temples and in their homes. The publisher has rejected those images as historically inaccurate. No images exist from the founder’s lifetime, 1469 to 1538. (link)

All of this raises the question — what, in fact, did Guru Nanak look like? We don’t have any images from his lifetime, and the later ones are clearly products of the values of their eras. What, historically, do we actually know? I went to Navtej Sarna’s recent book, The Book of Nanak, to see what I could find out.

It looks like everyone’s favorite Canadian (after Alex Trebek, Michael J. Fox, and the late Peter Jennings) is having a bit of trouble with the mother tongue. It’s been getting her quite frustrated (thanks for the tip Mona):

Napanee, Ontario native Avril Lavigne is showing appreciation for her fans around the world, and looking to sell a lot more albums, by recording her new “Girlfriend” single in eight different languages.

While some detractors aren’t convinced that Lavigne has mastered English yet, her annoying single can now be heard in Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. Lavigne even went so far as trying to record it in Hindi, but the language was too difficult to match the song’s western rhythm, said manager Terry McBride in a Canadian Press interview following his keynote address at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel as part of the Canadian Music Week conference. McBride said that Portuguese was the hardest language to learn, next to Hindi, and that the singer spent hours studying foreign language recordings before going into the studio to record the song. [Link]

Obviously Lavigne, an icon of the punk rock movement, didn’t have the right Hindi tutor. I’m sorry but am I the only one offended here? Don’t be tellin’ me that Mandarin is any easier than Hindi. Why do Indians always seem to get shafted? Why did she have to make the Hindi version of her song match the white man’s “western rythym?” So let’s watch the video together and imagine it in Hindi. Lavigne, you’ve let us down this time.

The annual Best of the Best dance competition that has been previously held in NYC (see here and here), has moved to Chicago this year. On Saturday, April 7th, hordes of young Bhangra fans will descend upon the windy city like locust. Will our elusive Ennis make an appearance there as well?

After drawing an audience of more than 2,000 last year, Best of the Best (B.O.B) dance competition is back in its third year, bringing the best dancers from across North America to one stage to compete for a grand prize totaling $6,500.

B.O.B has moved from New York City to Chicago, and is proud to announce that this years competition is at the world-renown Arie Crown Theater at McCormick Place on Saturday, April 7th, 2007. The event promises to attract an audience of over 4,000 people nationwide to watch nine teams compete in three categories. Ticket holders can expect a special guest performance at the competition, as well as an after party featuring some of the country’s best DJs.

B.O.B is unique in that it is the first large-scale non-profit competition to bridge the gap among different South Asian dance styles and crown one winner among the top teams. The show consists of three dance categories: Bhangra, Raas-Garba, and Fusion/Bollywood. Competing teams are invited after placing first at a previous South Asian national competition such as Boston Bhangra, South Beach Bhangra, Raas Chaos, Dandia Dhamaka, Bollywood Berkeley, Phillyfest, Chicago-Agni and others.

You can get your tickets here. Speaking of Indian dance competitions, a story last week in the SF Chronicle took a look at what seems to be a growing market for these types of events:

For Indian-American students reared in the United States, Bollywood dance competitions have become a way to connect with their parents’ culture without losing touch with what they see on MTV.

Rohit Bal, 20, a third-year management science major at the University of California, San Diego, grew up in a mostly white suburb of Los Angeles, with few other Indians.

”Up until college, I was more … I guess you could call it whitewashed,” he said. The dancing “was a window to get in touch with my culture, with my parent’s culture, while making it fun for myself.”

Approving, Indian-born parents filled the seats closest to the stage at the Scottish Rite Center. [Link]

When my wife and I were trying to decide on new pots and pans last year, it was kind of hard to pick the right set. Not only were we confused by the all-clad versus the myriad types of calphalon sets, we wanted to get some nice “crockery” that would be good for cooking Indian food. Outside of the handy prestige pressure-cooker that I am slowly learning how to use, we couldn’t find any real options for fancy-shmancy cooking pots-and-pans specifically for Indian food. So imagine my surprise when I was perusing the most recent Williams-Sonoma catalog and found a whole section dedicated to Indian spices, Indian food-specific pots and pans, and Williams-Sonoma Kitchen recipes for a variety of different indian food items, including, samosas, chapatis, and even kheer (Indian rice pudding). Sure, my mom would kill me if she knew I entertained the notion of buying a 9 ounce, $39 set of spices, or a $13 dollar simmer sauce, but I appreciate that Le Creuset is selling a tava griddle, and that Cuisinart is uping the ante in the pressure cooker game. I must admit though, I am a bit confused by the Calphalon One Indian Wok (Wok, India?). My initial thought was that maybe it would be perfect for cooking tasty Indian-Chinese food like my favorite gobi manchurian, but the description in the catalog cleared it up:

“Based on the karahi, the traditional Indian wok commonly used for simmering curries and stews, stir-frying and deep-frying, this infused-anodized wok is ideal for recreating the favorite dishes you enjoy at Indian restaurants. Its interior sears and browns perfectly and develops the rich caramelized flavor essential for creating delicious pan sauces. Adapted from the karahi’s customary round bottom, this wok’s flat bottom makes it easy to use on Western stoves. Two beautifully shaped loop handles - inspired by graceful scrollwork on Indian architecture - allow you to carry the oven-safe pan to the table for serving in authentic Indian style.” (link)

I received an nice email from a childhood friend this morning. He said:

I was thinking of your mother yesterday. It was International Women’s Day, and an Indian colleague was telling a story about her mom’s traditional role in the household as non-partner, non-decision-maker, etc, who sat on the floor while the men sat in chairs. I thought of your apartment, which always smelled like tasty traditional Indian food. But I also knew your mom as a successful professional and strong head of household. It just got me thinking and reminiscing, and was a nice daydream to have.

In an odd way, what stuck out to me was his mention of smells. We grew up in the same apartment building, and played together a fair amount as young kids. So if he says that our apartment had pleasant aromas associated with cooking, I believe him.

Still, despite the strong association between smell and memory, for the life of me, I can’t remember what foods my friends’ apartments smelled like at all. I recall plenty of other aromas from my childhood, many of which are about food, but none of them are about residences smelling like the foods people ate there. Go figure.

It’s a conversation we’ve had here often. We’ve talked about that curry smell and how meat smells create vegetarian self-segregation. It repeats elsewhere too. One of our (non-desi) readers remarked, on her own blog, that she was puzzled as to where the persistent pleasant smell of Indian food was coming from, only to realize that it was her.

Still, a story from a week ago will, I think, elevate this debate. Sunita Williams, the hadesi astronaut, has desi food in her “bonus container”:

Williams … has several Indian dishes in her bonus container, including Punjabi kadhi with pakora - vegetable fritters topped with yogurt and curry - and mutter paneer, a curry dish. The dishes are packaged to have a long shelf life in space. [Link]

Via the newstab (thanks, KXB!) there’s an article on thirteen-year-old Kunal Sah of Green River, Utah, who will be representing the state in the upcoming Scripps National Spelling Bee at the end of May. Kunal’s story is unlike those of other brown spellers we usually hear about. His parents were deported last year after living in this country legally for sixteen years.

According to the article:

Ken and Sarita Sah were deported back to India last July after 16 years residing legally in this country. Ken Sah came to the country as a student, and later applied for asylum because the region of India from which he came was experiencing religious violence. Then Sah waited for an asylum hearing for nearly 10 years. Had 10 years passed without a hearing, Sah would have been granted automatic asylum. But three weeks shy of that 10-year window, he got a hearing, and was denied asylum. He appealed until he ran out of appeals last year. Tougher immigration laws after 9/11 made his request for asylum more difficult. He and his wife ultimately lost their battle to remain in the country.

Patsy Stoddard, the editor of the Emery County Progress newspaper, describes Ken and Sarita as model citizens. “Our governor went to India to bring back a baby,” she says. “And yet here is a family torn apart, and nobody is doing anything about it.”

In a telephone interview, Ken Sah is matter-of-fact. “It’s very tough. He calls every day, and he cries,” he says of his son. “He needs to live with his parents. But he doesn’t have that. We try to make him feel better and stronger.”

“I don’t want to raise him in this lonely country,” says Ashima (Tabu), soon after the birth of Gogol Ganguli in Mira Nair’s new movie The Namesake, opening in a limited release today. Based on the critically acclaimed and commercially successful novel of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri, the movie proves to be a remarkably faithful adaptation. Raise him here, of course, she does, but those words remain a rare break in her composure, a heartfelt expression of homesickness and fear.

For the record, I loved the book, and was rather nervous about how such a tender mood piece - thin on plot and crowded with sensitively drawn characters - could possibly translate onto film. The story of a young Bengali couple, strangers to each other, starting a life together in a foreign country, raising children who might grow up to be strangers to them in turn, vanishing, absorbed into the alien world… the frisson of recognition for almost any South Asian immigrant would be electric, right?

It certainly was to me, as I sat there trembling in my seat, watching the title credits scroll across the screen in a Bangla script that slowly faded to English lettering.

I work with twenty people, eighteen of whom are men; recently, I’ve been privy to outrage and debate regarding the following scandal (when I’m not ignoring boasts regarding bracketology, that is). I didn’t realize that there was a Sepia angle to the Adam “Pacman” Jones controversy until Anantha kindly alerted us to it, earlier today. I’ll get to that, but first, let’s catch up other non-ESPN-addicts with what the hell I’m going on about:

It’s Feb. 19 in Vegas and, two miles from The Strip at a club called Minxx, the three-day party that is the NBA All-Star Weekend is about to end.

With gunfire.

According to witnesses, Adam Bernard “Pacman” Jones sits in a VIP booth with seven acquaintances, six of them women, the other his bodyguard. They’re drinking Dom Perignon champagne and Patron tequila, which goes for $600 a bottle. Pacman watches as Cornell Haynes Jr. — America knows him as the rapper Nelly — and music producer Jermaine Dupri (whose girlfriend is Janet Jackson) “make it rain” dollar bills for several songs. Jones, the Tennessee Titans cornerback who considers himself a major player, wants a piece of their action. Pacman asks an employee to convert $3,400 in larger bills into smaller denominations and approaches the stage. Wide-eyed, almost childlike, he showers fists full of dollars on the dancers.

What happened next, in the context of the law, might not be determined for months, if ever. But when the gunshots ended, a security guard, a former WWF wrestler named Tommy Urbanski, was on the ground with his spinal cord shattered by a bullet. Two others, another bouncer and a female patron, were also shot.

To be clear, Las Vegas police consider Jones a WITNESS, not a person of interest; the trouble-magnet of an athlete claims he’s not the one. The club owner says he made threats and knows the gunman, who has yet to be found. But just in case…

Even though he hasn’t been charged, Jones hired an attorney, Manny Arora, from the same Atlanta-based law firm that defended Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis on charges of murder and aggravated assault in 2000.

The entire ESPN article is a fascinating read and I say that as someone who is almost entirely bored by sports (unless it’s something else fascinating…like cricket). I’m not saying I have any sympathy for Pacman (who got his nick because of the enthusiastic way he housed bottles of milk when he was a wee thing) or the devil for that matter, but after reading a backstory like this:

Misfortune is something that has touched Jones early, and often. His father, Adam, was shot in the back of the head and died when Pacman was 5. His mother, Deborah, spent three years in prison. An uncle died from a knife wound. He’s seen some of his peers die. He was raised chiefly by his grandmother, Christine Jones, and she died of cancer after he graduated from high school.

In high school I had a social studies teacher who was a HinJew. He was an old hippy who found eastern religion, and through that became more of an observant Jew (no, it doesn’t make total sense, but that’s how it was). I was just thinking that Mr. Steinfink would have been very busy last weekend with both Holi and Purim falling at the same time.

It’s funny how similar the two events are. They’re both great holidays for kids — you get to throw colored powder on people, dress up, and make noise — but they also involve the sanctioned or encouraged use of mind altering substances as well. A little something for for all ages, I guess.

The LA Times has an article on a Holi festival that took place in southern California last weekend:

About 150 people from Southern California gathered Saturday at Arcadia Park to celebrate Holi — the Pan-Indian “festival of colors,” a holiday celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs and some Muslims that rejoices in the coming of spring and the triumph of good over evil. It is considered a major Hindu festival.

The reporter also gives a run-down on the history of Holi:

One version of the tale tells of Prehlad’s father, Hiranyakshipu, an evil man who wanted Prehlad to worship him, not the Hindu god Vishnu. After many attempts to change his son’s mind, Hiranyakshipu decides to burn him to death, and his aunt, Holika, is to help. In the end, Holika is burned to death and Prehlad is saved.

Another story is about the Hindu god Krishna, who is said to have lived 5,000 years ago. He enjoyed dalliances with the milkmaids, especially Radha. On Holi, Krishna asked his mother why his skin was darker than Radha’s. His mother told him to rub paint on her. She retaliated and eventually, all the villagers joined in. Since then, Holi has also been celebrated with colors.

Holi is something anybody can take part in because you do not need anything, just water and color. You can go to the home of an upper-caste person and throw water at them and rub color on them. But the following day, everything reverts back to normal.

In the United States, celebrants said it was a good day to take time off from hectic days of work, relax with friends and family and to renew friendships. “If you are on bad terms with someone, you don’t need to speak words to them,” said Sonia Anand, 35, of Arcadia. “Sometimes the words hold you back, and all you need is some color and a hug.”

I am not, I repeat not, calling him a ho. Hey, $200,000 to me sounds like a perfectly fair price to make an appearance at a Sweet Sixteen birthday party. Even when you’re already on a $100 million contract with a $34 million guaranteed signing bonus. Yeah, yeah, I know, maybe the dough wasn’t that much, and maybe it all went to charity, or something. But that gets us to the more important question: Who the hell spends that kind of money on their daughter’s 16th birthday party? And if Peyton cost two hundred grand, what was the total bill for the event considering that Cedric the Entertainer and Mallika Sherawat were apparently also in the house?

Either way, the whole thing was lampooned yesterday on both PTI and ATH on ESPN; you can find the video by digging around here. The consensus view was: Tacky. Offer your own thoughts on the matter here, or if you prefer a more down and dirty environment, check out the comment threads at Deadspin (which broke this story) or AOL Sports, where the proportion of terrorist and camel jokes is actually refreshingly low.

It’s only because Abhi doesn’t pay us I don’t have the time that I haven’t taken myself down to Manhattan Supreme Court to check out on your behalf, gentle reader, the ongoing circus that is generating press clips of this nature:

A city cop who testified he was seduced at age 13 by his East Side Montessori school principal suffered a figurative beating by the same headmistress in court yesterday. …

“Did that involve any noise?” Shargel asked. “Noises that are often attendant to the act of making love?” The cop answered, “The TV would be on loud.”

Backstory and Desi Angle (TM): Well, you see, the Montessori school principal in question is desi. Name of Lina Sinha, age 40. The alleged events took place about ten years ago. It seems something went down between the two, but just what, and how illegal, and whether it can be proved, is up in the air. He says she raped him when he was underage. She says they had an affair after he turned 17, which ended badly; that she had accused him of beating her and he, fearing this would lose him his job with the NYPD, turned around and accused her of rape.

Additional elements of note: Steven Soderbergh was almost a juror in the case. Too bad he didn’t make the final cut - there’s sex here for sure, and lies somewhere, and all we need is the videotape. Second element of note: Sinha’s attorney is Gerald Shargel, who is best known for defending mobsters. Damn! Maybe I will make it down to the court after all. The whole scene sounds classic.

Get your fix with these stories from the first day of the trial last week (Daily News flava; New York Post flava with photo of Sinha — go on, you know you want to; New York Times flava), and these updates. Looks like Shargel’s scoring some points, which is why he gets paid the big bucks. We’ll try and keep an eye on this tawdriness for you as the trial continues.

Guess what? Virginia ain’t just for lovers no more. It is also for Indian Americans. Well, at least on January 26th of every year:

Virginia will celebrate January 26 as Indian-American Day in recognition of the community’s contribution to the State.

A legislation to this effect was recently passed by its legislature.

”Over the past year, I have come to realize how much the Indian-American community contributes to the Commonwealth. In appreciation of their efforts and all they have done for the Commonwealth and its people, it is my pleasure to announce the creation of Indian-American Day in Virginia,” Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling said. [Link]

Let me rephrase that quote by Bolling so that it is slightly more honest. “Over the past year, I have come to realize that you shouldn’t refer to brown people as Macacas but rather, you should make dosas with them.”

Although this is bound to upset some of our more sensitive readers, I do wish they had been more inclusive and called it “Macaca-American Day” instead. The way I see it, we have nearly 10 months to plan. How are we going to celebrate our own day?

“The face of Virginia is changing and the immigrant community is a powerful force in urban and suburban Virginia,” Bolling said, adding that he wanted to do everything he could to reach out to the immigrant community and build a ‘better’ Virginia.

“During my campaign for Lieutenant Governor I made a promise to the Indian-American community. I promised to do my best to develop closer ties with them and involve them more in the leadership of Virginia,” he said. [Link]

While we’re on the subject of television, am I the first person to think of shows like Lost and Heroes as the television equivalent of “magic realism” in the novel? These shows have elements of science fiction and fantasy, but remain grounded in realistic narration, human relationships, and a world that more or less resembles our own (with certain quiet variations). As a result, they can achieve mainstream respectability and broad popularity, while true Sci-Fi remains somewhat of a smaller, niche market — the “outer space” of basic cable, if you will.

This is going to sound blasphemous, but Heroes in particular actually reminds me a little of Midnight’s Children in some ways. Remember this delightful passage from Rushdie’s novel:

From Kerala, a boy who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and re-emerging through any surface in the land—through lakes, and (with greater difficulty), the polished bodies of automobiles … and a Goanese girl with the gift of multiplying fish … and children with powers of transformation: a werewolf from the Nilgiri hills, and from the great watershed of the Vindhvas, a boy who could increase or reduce his size at will, and had already (mischievously) been the cause of wild panic and rumors of the return of Giants … from Kashmir, there was a blue-eyed child of whose sex I was never certain, since by immersing herself in water he (or she) could alter it as she (or he) pleased. Some of us called this child Narada, others Markandaya, depending on which old fairy story of sexual change we had heard … near Jalna in the heart of the parched Deccan I found a water-divining youth, and at Budge-Budge outside of Calcutta a sharp-tongued girl whose words already had the power of inflicting physical wounds, so that after a few adults had found themselves bleeding freely as a result from some barb flung casually from her lips, they decided to lock her up in a bamboo cage and float her off down the Ganges to the Sunderbans jungles (which are the rightful home of monsters and phantasms); but nobody dared approach her, and she moved through the town surrounded by a vacuum of fear; nobody had the courage to deny her food. There was a boy who could eat metal and a girl whose fingers were so green that she could grow prize aubergines in the Thar desert; and more and more…

Ah, Rushdie: the old passages don’t disappoint. Of course, the different magical powers don’t map precisely to the characters in Heroes, but there are certain overlaps:

Wow, go Filmiholic — this week she has interviews with both Kal Penn and Jhumpa Lahiri coinciding with the imminent release of The Namesake.

She and Kal Pann actually discuss Sepia Mutiny in Part 1 of their interview, with regards to the SM debate over desis playing terrorists in hollywood, and specifically Kal Penn’s role as a terrorist in a recent episode of 24. I gather he’s sympathetic to the fact that people are having a discussion, but not entirely sympathetic to the “blogging = people yakking at each other endlessly” part:

The point that I was trying to make was that I’m glad that people are discussing it, why I’m glad that people are getting pissed off about it is that I think that one of the things that’s happened since September 11 is we feel like we don’t have control over our representatives in government, especially as people of color, and I think it’s important to take that back.

It’s important to write letters to your Senator, your Congressman, to the guys who are actually voting on the issues that come up fictitiously on 24. The things that happen on 24 are so far-fetched, but there’s an under layer of reality to them that applies to things like the Patriot Act and racial profiling.

These are things that I hope people don’t just blog on Sepia Mutiny and whine their asses off, I hope that they take that a step further and take the passions they explain in those blogs and send a letter to Hillary Clinton, send a letter to whoever your usual rep is and it does have a remarkable effect when you do it as voting block and I hope that it motivates people to take that a step further. (link)

(A little ouch there… two quick responses: first, it should be pointed out that in several instances — Power 99 and Hot 97 come to mind — SM has done a bit more than whine. Second, just watch what we do on the 2008 elections, mofo!)

Anyway, the question stands: on the question of whether to do something like “Van Wilder,” I have to admit I have no idea what I would do in his shoes — how can one make the best out of a rather limited array of options for an Indian-American actor? Especially several years ago, before we had Harold and Kumar, Lost, E.R., and Heroes.

Still, as a counterpoint, I would encourage people to read the recent New Yorker profile of Joel Surnow, the guy behind 24. I was especially disturbed about Surnow’s blithe embrace of the use of torture in the show, contrary to American law and all existing human rights conventions. Once one knows that justifying torture is a pattern in the show — or, put more forcefully, a specific ideology it is promoting — it might be easier to see where to draw the line.

The ever-interesting Stratpage has a summary of the next generation of Berlin Walls’ being built all over the world.

Good Fences = Good Neighbors

March 4, 2007: There a lot of large scale barrier systems going up in the world…

…Israel is building a 700 kilometers barrier between itself and the Palestinian West Bank.

…Pakistan is building a barrier along its 2,400 kilometer border with Afghanistan .

…Kuwait is upgrading its 215 kilometers of barrier along its Iraq border.

…Spain is building barriers around its two enclaves in Morocco

And so on. But the biggest wall of them all is actually being built by India -

India is building a 4,000 kilometer barrier along its border with Bangladesh. Various Indian rebel groups have been using bases in Bangladesh, and the local government has been reluctant to shut them down. That’s partly because of the large number of illegal migrants moving from Bangladesh to India.

For comparison, the oft-talked about, but never really implemented, US-Mexico border fence would be a full 1000km shorter than India’s Great Wall . And appropriately, the debate surrounding India’s wall echoes familiar arguments and issues from south of the US border.

Last year I did a post on a poverty tourism experiment happening in Delhi. In both my own assessment and in the comments, opinion on the program was mixed: one the one hand, some people are offended by this concept, as it smacks of voyeurism. Others (like Bong Breaker) pointed out that the people who run these tours put money back into charities that support the community, and perhaps the people who go on these tours could benefit by added awareness and sensitivity. And John Thompson, who founded Salaam Baalak Trust, actually chimed in with his own defense of the program.

Now the Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article on another poverty tourism program happening in Dharavi, Mumbai. John Lancaster acknowledges the controvery over Reality Tours and Travel, but also goes beyond it, to tell us what he learned from the tour itself. Some of what he has to say is surprising:

Dharavi stretched before us like a vast junkyard, a hodgepodge of brick and concrete tenements roofed with corrugated metal sheets that gleamed dully in the sunshine. Poojari gave us a moment to take it all in. “We’ll show you the positive side of a slum,” he declared.

In the face of such squalor, his words seemed jarring. But Dharavi’s industriousness is well documented. Its businesses manufacture a variety of products—plastics, pottery, bluejeans, leather goods—and generate an estimated $665 million in annual revenue. In other words, Dharavi is not just a slum, it is also a node on the global economy.

Dharavi’s industries are arranged geographically, like medieval guilds, and the first alley we visited belonged to recyclers. In one small “godown” (as warehouses are known on the subcontinent), men were disassembling old computer keyboards. In another, men smeared from head to toe in blue ink stripped the casings from used ballpoint pens so they could be melted down and recycled. A few doors down, workers used heavy chains to knock the residue from steel drums that had once contained polyester resin. Poojari told us that some of Dharavi’s empty plastic bottles come from as far away as the United Kingdom. “People from a rich family, when they drink from a plastic bottle, they don’t know what happens to it afterwards,” he said. “Here, you see.” (link)

And it continues in that vein: Dharavi as a hive of light industrial activity. He acknowledges the smell, the open sewage, and the crampedness, but he doesn’t dwell on those things so much. And he ends with a telling reflection:

No one gave us a second glance, and I had to wonder about the motives of those in the Indian media and elsewhere who claimed on behalf of the Dharavi residents to be offended by the tours. Surely their ire could have been better targeted at the municipal authorities who had failed to provide the community with basic sanitation. I wondered whether the critics weren’t simply embarrassed by the slum’s glaring poverty—an image at odds with the country’s efforts to rebrand itself as a big software park. In any case, it seemed to me that the purpose of the tour was not to generate pity, but understanding. That’s not to say that it made me an expert—I was only there a few hours, after all. Were the people I saw in Dharavi the victims of globalization, or its beneficiaries? I still don’t know. But at least the question had been raised in my mind.(link)

Does this article change your opinion of “poorism,” as poverty tourism is sometimes called? Or is Lancaster’s account of a few hours spent in Dharavi too “sanitized” to be of value?

So is anyone coming down to Texas for SXSW? An anonymous tipster with good taste in music points out that The Big Sleep (see also here), The Cassettes, Voxtrot, Swati Sharma, and Aziz Ansari will all be representing the brown.

Speaking of Aziz, as I am sure many of you heard, MTV (not MTV Desi) just gave him his own show titled:

Here is a little taste. You can check out more on their website.

Seems like that one time “Maverick” John McCain is falling like a rock (an old rock) in the way too early to matter polls. I still think that he would have won running away in ‘08 if he had run as an Independent instead of sucking up to the Radical Right and the Bush administration. That ship has sailed, however. While hanging out at the National Review’s website (ahem…cough cough), I came across Ramesh Ponnuru’s cover story interview with McCain. Here is an excerpt:

The “maverick” pose

Sen. McCain: I got some encouraging news this morning in the USA Today.

Ponnuru (reading headline): “McCain firm on Iraq war…” (McCain flips the paper over.) “Despite cost to candidacy”: even better…

Sen. McCain: (Laughs) Yep. They’ve got a poll that says 33 percent are much less likely, and 11 percent somewhat less likely to [vote for me]


Ponnuru: So do you think that’s already been costing you? That that’s behind some of the slides in the polls?

Sen. McCain: First of all, I don’t know. But second of all, I can’t worry about it. You just can’t, with something like this you just can’t let it concern you. The issue is too important. The sacrifice that so many young Americans have made already pales in significance to any cost that it may mean to me. You’ve seen these wounded kids, you know how much they’ve given.


Ponnuru: But is the country prepared to give more? The Post had a story on the front page that people want a deadline.

Sen. McCain: Well, I think that it’s the job of people like me to explain to them what’s at stake here. It isn’t just Iraq. I really believe that chaos will ensue, genocide will take place, and unlike after we lost the Vietnam War when they didn’t want to follow us home, these people want to follow us home. I think what’s at stake here is this entire struggle we’re in — you know I hate to use the word war, because then you give people legitimacy as soldiers — but the struggle that we’re in against radical Islamic extremism.

And so for me to somehow trim my sails on an issue like this would be just a disservice to the nation. [Link]

By the way, as an interesting side note. This post I wrote when SM was first getting started accounts for a large chunk of visits to our site even still.

In the kitchen one recent morning…

“Anna! How are you?”

“I’m well Asif, thank you for asking. And you?”

“Ah…busy with _, but you know how that is.”

“Yes. That’s why I’m caffeinating.”

“What you are drinking?”

“Espresso concentrate and milk.”

“Cold?”

“Yeah. It’s good.”

“Don’t you like tea?”

“I do, but I’m more of a coffee drinker. It’s a South Indian thing.”

“Where your parents are from?”

“Kerala.”

“Where that is?”

“Madras.”

“Ah, Madras. But you were born here.”

Just when you thought the old geezer couldn’t possibly have any surprises left in the bag, Amitabh Bachchan has walked into a controversy for the part he plays in the new Ram Gopal Varma film Nishabd.

The photo to the right says most of what you need to know. Big B. plays a 60 year old man who falls in love with his daughter’s eighteen-year old friend (played by newcomer Jiah Khan). He’s tortured about it, but it appears that nothing untoward happens between the two of them. Still, his wife finds out, and I gather from reviews that the film after intermission becomes a typical family melodrama — guilt, shame, etc. While the general scenario is roughly similar to Nabokov’s “Lolita,” the story is actually quite different: there’s no abduction, no marriage to and then murder of an inconvenient mother, and no insane cross-country chase involving witty pseudonyms. On the whole, the film seems to be an order of magnitude less twisted than Nabokov. (And that’s probably a relief.)

As for the quality of the film? Not great, by most accounts. (I haven’t seen it.) The best review I’ve seen is Baradwaj Rangan’s (via DesiPundit), and he is far from thrilled. He says Nishabd isn’t as good as Naach, which means it must be truly bad, since Naach was itself pretty crappy.

Congress government party officials in Uttar Pradesh want the film banned, on account of it being “against Indian values.” But does it really make sense to ban a film for flirting with a taboo — and not crossing it? We’re in strange territory here: somewhere between Minority Report and the Immaculate Conception. Anyway, it’s yet another example of a plea for censorship that is incoherent.

There has been a major protest in Allahabad over the film, where protesters have claimed the film is bringing in “Western values.” And here it might be noted that while Nishabd does seem to have a western feel for it, India does have a tradition of mature men and young women (or girls) getting together — it’s called child marriage. (That, incidentally, is a subject that the great V. Shantaram condemned some 70 years ago, in his film Duniya Na Maane. So this is not a new thing).

Two years ago when Aishwarya was promoting Bride and Prejudice in the US, we were subjected to this idiocy on Oprah. (My favorite part of the interview: Do Indian women practice the Kama Sutra?)

Now Fox Searchlight provides us with a tongue-in-cheek promotional interview with Kal Penn on The Namesake. Although this clip is staged, something tells me that Kal will be fielding similar questions from media personalities in the coming weeks. According to IMDB, the film opens this Friday, March 9. Brace yourselves, I’m sure we’ll have fodder to blog about.

Speaking of unhinged people in media, we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention the train wreck that recently went down at San Francisco’s AsianWeek newspaper, where a complete idiot by the name of Kenneth Eng, 22 years of age, wet behind the ears, hot under the collar, too big for his britches and bats in his belfry, has been allowed to write a column called, interestingly, “God of the Universe,” in which he spewed moronic racist rants against white people, fellow Asian people, and Black and Latino people, apparently unchecked until his most recent gem blew the lid off the whole damn pot. Entitled, “Why I Hate Black People,” it explained, well, why Kenneth Eng hates black people. Though he also likes to call them Negroes. The column has been pulled and AsianWeek, which ran this guy’s infantile bloviations for a number of months, has now issued a pathetic, simpering apology, but the text has been preserved for posterity in various places on the interwebs. Here is a wee sample:

Contrary to media depictions, I would argue that blacks are weak-willed. They are the only race that has been enslaved for 300 years. It is unbelievable that it took them that long to fight back. On the other hand, we slaughtered the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War.

You’ll find a link to a PDF of the whole thing here. Anyway, at the risk of over-extending this fool’s fifteen seconds of fame, I also wanted to draw your attention to his soapbox at Amazon, where he’s also peddling some really atrocious fantasy writing (there’s a link to excerpts on this page). He writes on his Amazon blog:

Let’s look at the muslim religion. They believe that music, dance, naked women and other such things are “indecent”. They think that some creature called “allah” will bring them peace, yadda, yadda, yadda. They think that if they bow every day, they will somehow be transported to a place called “heaven”, where everyone looks conspicuously human. I don’t know about you, but I masturbate all the time. It’s not going to affect me in any way, aside from making me need to take baths more often. And listening to O Fortuna will not make my head explode. Nor will spitting at every church I see make my intestines burst out of my abdomen.

Furthermore, most religious people I’ve met tend to be incredibly stupid/poor. They are usually black/hispanic immigrants who do not have the brains or the balls to understand science and thus resort to reading retarded stories about saviors and saints. (Oh, by the way, for those of you who want to scream at how “racist” I am for mentioning negroes and hispanics in such a way, go to someone who gives a sh*t).

OK, that’s enough of that. So what’s this AsianWeek anyway? Here’s a take from Neelanjana Banerjee, who was once a reporter and editor there. AsianWeek’s pitch to advertisers says the paper is aimed at “1.5, 2nd and 3rd generation Asian Americans” — basically the East Asian equivalent of a lot of y’all macacas reading this site. You’d think someone there would have had the sense to sever young Mr. Eng’s ties to the paper a long time ago. I’m all for free speech, but I’ve rarely seen a more compelling case for blacklisting (pun intended! ha ha Kenneth, I said blacklisting!) — or maybe just an good ol’ fashioned beatdown. Happy Friday everybody!

Props to tipster Rajath, who overnight sent in a link to this extraordinary item (via Wonkette) on the blog of George Archibald, a journalist who worked for two decades at the Washington Times and clearly maintains close connections there, since he has the verbatim backstory on the paper’s recent series on female abortion in India. Now I know that gender selection in India (and in other countries, yes, yes) is a serious and real issue. And also, far be it from me to impugn the journalistic standards of the Washington Times, which as I’m sure you heroes know is the brave and patriotic alternative to that noted leftist, freedom-hating rag the Washington Post, but still, it seems that managing editor Fran Coombs has taken it to that other level:

The day before, there was a brief discussion on the foreign desk about a pending series by religion writer Julia Duin on the abortion of girls in India. The Times had expended a lot of money for Julia Duin and photographer Mary Calvert to travel to India to produce this series.

In the discussion with colleagues on The Washington Times foreign desk, editor Jones said: “The reason we are running this story is that Coombs thinks all the aborted girls means that Indian men will be immigrating to the United States to marry our girls.” That is an exact quote, what Jones told his colleagues on the foreign desk.

Coombs has told me and others repeatedly that he favors abortion because he sees it as a way to eliminate black and other minority babies.

Read Archibald’s post for more newsroom shenanigans involving this character. Meanwhile, if there are any red-blooded Caucasians reading this site, here’s another reason for you to hide your daughters from the impending hordes of brown.

I know that many SM readers like to partake in one particular cross-border skirmish we seem to have a lot here. You know the one of which I speak, right? It’s the herbivores vs. the carnivores (although technically we are all omnivores). Well, to throw a little fuel on to that fire I submit to you this book review over at Slate.com.. The book is titled “Bloodless Revolution” and is meant to be a sort of “history of European vegetarianism.” I haven’t read the book but the review was quite insightful. First the background on the book:

Here’s the story as he tells it in The Bloodless Revolution: In the 17th century, a fundamental question about the relationship between ourselves and the other creatures of the earth broke out into passionate debate, a debate that swooped over and around and through the culture, rattling long-held European assumptions about the very nature of life. There was no single word adequate to capture the ideas that were bursting forth, until the term vegetarian emerged in the middle of the 19th century. And with that, the battle was over—not because meat-eating came to an end but because European culture made a home for this challenge to dietary norms, giving it a local habitation and a name. Whether or not this constituted a victory for animal-lovers is hard to say. As Stuart points out early on, when the concept of vegetarianism became domesticated, it turned into “a distinct movement that could easily be pigeon-holed, and ignored.” But people did start thinking differently about animals, human responsibilities, and the rights of living creatures, albeit rarely to the extreme sought by such groups as PETA. Stuart sums it up well: Nowadays, he says, “negotiating compassion with the desire to eat is customary…” [Link]

The critic contends, however, that vegetarianism from a European perspective isn’t so much something they accept as a way of life but is rather a philosophy to be practiced off an on:

If vegetarianism has settled comfortably into Western culture by now, it’s because the term vegetarian has become so vast and shapeless that it describes just about everybody who isn’t on the Atkins diet. To be sure, there are vegetarians who avoid all animal food. But most are willing to eat eggs, and many eat fish. Chicken is fine with some because hey, it isn’t beef. Hamburgers? Absolutely not—or maybe just once in a while. And turkey because it’s Thanksgiving, ham because it’s Easter, pepperoni because it’s pizza—what on earth is a vegetarian, anyway? No wonder Stuart never tries to define the term. A huge, wonderfully entertaining cast of dietary rebels parades through his chapters, but all we really know about the eating habits of these pagans, scientists, doctors, scholars, theologians, writers, philosophers, and crackpots is that most of them ate meat. [Link]