If womens boxing becomes an Olympic sport in 2012, the Afghan women’s boxing team is set to become the new feel good story, the Jamaican bobsled team if you will.

These women have a lot of heart, just to train, given restrictions on women even in post-Taliban Afghanistan:

The training is sponsored by a peace group who want to give women more self-respect, and reclaim boxing as a sport in a country scarred by conflict - making martial arts constructive and not destructive. They call it “fighting for peace”. Between training sessions the boxers sit down and discuss non-violent approaches to conflict resolution.

The NGO backing the project, Co-operation for Peace and Unity, is headed by Kanishka Nawabi. He says they are teaching women to be confident and regain self-respect in a male-dominated society. [Link]

Of course, there are some men who will be threatened for precisely that reason - they don’t women playing sports, especially not violent ones, and they definitely don’t want them to become to assertive. This is why it’s a subversive action. After all, this is what is happening to women in regular schools:

In the southern Afghan province of Helmand, the Taliban is waging war not only on foreign and Afghan troops, but on education. Of 224 schools that opened after the Taliban fell, at least 90 have been forced to close because of threats and attack — especially schools that teach girls. [Link]

and the girls from the Kabul Beauty School have been threatened with death for defaming the country (not because of their beautician work but because of the other things the book says about them).

Click on the image below to go to the video newsclip. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to embed it, but the video is fun, enlightening and short.

As many readers probably already know, actor Sanjay Dutt was just sentenced to six years ‘rigorous imprisonment’ for possessing illegal weapons, including an AK-56. Last winter, he was cleared on more serious terrorism/conspiracy charges relating to the Bombay blasts of 1993. My first thought was, oh well — no Munnabhai 3, I guess. (Or, who knows? Intezar karo, Munnabhai?)

But then there are more serious questions — one might be, is it really a fair sentence? Readers, what do you think?

In my view, even if, it’s legally a reasonable sentence, Sanju does have an explanation for owning a weapon in 1993. For one thing, as a film star (and as the son of two very famous actors), his family was a target for the criminal underworld; I’m sure he wasn’t the only one to have these kinds of weapons in his possession at the time. Secondly, as of 1992/3, the Dutts were also apparently getting regular death threats from communalists following their humanitarian work on behalf of Muslims in the areas affected by the 1992 riots. Given the total lawlessness in Bombay at the time as well as his family’s own prominence, both on screen and in politics, one can understand what he might have been thinking.

On YouTube, you can watch a BBC Channel 4 Documentary on Sanju, called Sanjay Dutt: To Hell and Back, that talks about the Dutt family, Sanjay’s troubled youth (did I mention he was a heroin addict in the 1980s?), and the events surrounding the trial. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. (Part 2 is the section that deals the most with the events leading up to the arrest.)

I also think the fact that Dutt has had this trial hanging over his head for fourteen years is pretty severe punishment in itself. While I respect the court’s judgment, today I feel bad for Sanju. The Bollywood actor who should really be in jail is probably Salman Khan: Sanjay Dutt may have been a bad boy, but at least he never killed anyone, eh? (Ok, allegedly killed anyone.)

It looks like Jughead wont be the only cartoon character wearing a crown in Riverdale any more, there’s a desi (probably ABD) character in Archie’s world (via UB). I’m happy that the character looks and sounds like the others, hopefully he wont be Hajji to Archie’s Johnny Quest.

That said, I actually associate Archie more with India than America. I rarely saw Archie in the USA, but when I went to India there was always a stack of Archie comics in my relatives’ houses in Delhi. Since I often got bored hanging around while the adults caught up on years of news, I spent many hours reading the escapades of Archie, Betty, Veronica, Reggie and Jughead. Just writing this brings back that India paper smell, and all of a sudden I’m 10 again and in my parents’ country, with all the ambivalence that entails.

One of the Christian Science Monitor’s reporters recently caught a showing of the apparently eagerly awaited film “Khuda ke Liye (In the Name of God)” in Lahore:

Why would I drive 4-1/2 hours to see a Pakistani movie?…

The film is being hailed in some segments of Pakistani society as the most important cinematic event in memory…

As the title suggests, the movie is about Islam and the battle between two polarized groups - modernized elites carrying the banner of “enlightened moderation” and radicals with their “jihad” - both had claims to the religion…

For many Pakistanis - or at least those in this theater - the movie offers an explanation for the unrest around them.

“I had been dying to see this movie,” Sara Malik, a 17-year-old student, dressed in jeans and a powder-pink T-shirt told me after the movie. “It’s an amazing story, because it explains what really happens behind things like the Lal Masjid [Red Mosque],” she said, with nods of agreement by nearby school friends. The violent weeklong battle between religious militants and the Pakistan Army this month in Islamabad was unnerving for the entire country and unlike anything the youth of the country had ever witnessed. [Link]

A synopsis of the movie, about musician brothers caught up in a post September 11th world, can be found on the film’s website. Adding to the local relevancy of the film (as mentioned by the young woman above) was the recent Lal Masjid siege (a.k.a. Operation Sunrise) against the militant Ghazi brothers:

Abdul Rashid Ghazi of the Red Mosque, for example, made one of his last anti-vice stands against the release of “In the Name of God.” Mr. Ghazi called the movie blasphemous and anti-Islamic. “We won’t allow this,” he warned the government earlier this month.

Ghazi was killed a few days after uttering those words at the hands of the Pakistani military, and the movie is now showing all over the Punjab province, the Pakistan Army’s stronghold, in the city of Karachi the financial capital, and a few well-to-do surrounding towns in Sindh. It is unlikely to make its way west to the provinces bordering Afghanistan and Iran. The uncensored movie is not only likely to be rejected by the provincial governments led by Islamist parties, but also by the Pashtun and Baluchi tribes themselves, who are portrayed as violent, cunning, and chauvinistic religious fanatics in the movie. [Link]

“Put up a post, please. Now, if possible.”

“Like…a test post?”

“Yes. A post. Any post.”

“Um…okay.”

I leaned back, then giggled. I was in a silly mood. A few moments later…

i’m brown irish, actually.

there once was a group of brown nerds
who spent all their time toying with words
they all loved to blog
(some from a city with fog)
b/c let’s face it, a social life’s for the birds.

(mc sharaabi, out)

“Ta-da!”, I trilled, to my late German Shepherd, Rani.

A few moments later, a terse reply appeared: “thanks.” Don’t ask me how, but I knew that his trebuchet-lettered, monosyllabic response had been punctuated by one mighty eye-roll, instead of just a period.

And that’s how it all began, on July 30, 2004

::

It was dizzying, the start of this thing, this “project”, this labor of love, loathe, learning and light.

Political ads were everywhere, constantly reminding us that we were cynical spectators at the race to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; so were news stories, about outsourcing, racism (clumsily cloaked as wit), and profiling. Three years ago, we were outraged over the very same things. Normally, this would depress me, but I can’t despair, not now, not over this. This is extraordinary. The issues may be the same, but everything else is different, because we are different. We are here.

::

July, 2004.

I wrote a post on my original blog, HERstory.

Manish wrote a post on his original blog, vij.com.

Abhi emailed us, plus two more.

“Guys, I can’t believe so many of my friends are still undecided about whom to vote for…yet when I show them your story on Mamta, Anna, or yours on Michigan’s GOP, Manish…then they’re suddenly more decisive. You know what we need to do? We need to centralize this, all of this information…because the conventions are coming and what is at stake is so important…we need to reach more people.”

There were murmurs of agreement and empathy.

“Guys, I think we should create a group blog for this stuff. Think about it— all of our readerships overlap a little bit…the same people who might read Anna, sometimes read Manish or me….it’s great that we’re raising awareness about these desi news stories that get no attention otherwise, but we should focus our efforts, so people aren’t going to different places. This is the first year they’ll allow bloggers at the convention! We need to do this. Now.”

And we did.

For approximately six hours, furious rounds of emails passed, a few instant messenger chats popped and one phone call was made…then, we paused. The most difficult decision we had faced yet stymied us, putting a consummate, thudding halt to our spectacular telesis.

Uh, what would we name this goo-covered thing, which was “crowning” and about to force its debut any minute now?

Desirati?

Indian Ink?

Blogwalla?

Tamarind.

Amar Akbar Anthony?

Dishoom Dishoom?

XDesi?

BrownAmerica?

Desispiracy?

PanDesi?

Desinfect?

Desified?

Shotgun Rishta!

Desintegrate?

Blogging While Brown.

We each had submitted close to a dozen names; we ranked and re-ranked, and then calculated which idea had what percentage of support. It was exhausting. It reminded me of sorority rush, when prospective pledges ranked the houses they liked and we did the same on the other end, hoping that without too much delay or effort, everything would get sorted and everyone would be happy.

Uh, no.

After blazing through vision, expectations, concepts and possibilities, unanimously agreeing, almost immediately, on all of it (No meetings? GREAT. No deadlines or assigned stories? Awesome! No expectations or rules, beyond the barest minimum of guidelines, which all seemed to pop out of our heads identically and simultaneously? FANtastic. Some of us have never [and still never!] met? Who cares?)…we were stuck.

“What about Sepia Mutiny?”, I blurted out.

Silence.

Since I have been traveling almost non-stop for the last several weeks, I never got a chance to report out on the Beats, Rhymes, and Life event that I organized with some friends in Houston a couple weeks back (July 19th). As a reminder, I was trying to emulate the success of Washington D.C.’s Subcontinental Drift series by bringing some soul to the south (by getting some of Houston’s South Asian artists together for a night). I was hoping that word of mouth would get about 50 people to show up. Half an hour into the event I was sweating as only about a dozen people showed. Thank goodness for the reliability of Indian Standard Time. Well over 100 people showed on a Thursday night! The drum circle was ridiculously good and we had spoken-word pieces, belly-dancing to Dhoom 2, a comedian, and DJ Raj Swift among the acts. The lesson here is that all you need is a city and one mic. Just make it happen in your city if you really want to see something like this there. Click below for larger pics of the event:

This morning’s Los Angeles Times had an article examining the way in which Hillary Clinton often straddles the fence on the outsourcing issue by cleverly playing to both Indian Americans and to big labor (two of her big money supporters):

To many labor unions and high-tech workers, the Indian giant Tata Consultancy Services is a serious threat — a company that has helped move U.S. jobs to India while sending thousands of foreign workers on temporary visas to the United States.

So when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) came to this struggling city to announce some good news, her choice of partners was something of a surprise.

Joining Tata Consultancy’s chief executive at a downtown hotel, Clinton announced that the company would open a software development office in Buffalo and form a research partnership with a local university. Tata told a newspaper that it might hire as many as 200 people.

The 2003 announcement had clear benefits for the senator and the company: Tata received good press, and Clinton burnished her credentials as a champion for New York’s depressed upstate region. [Link]

In this arrangement, both sides appear to win. Buffalo gets new jobs and a big Indian business becomes more credible in its future dealings with the U.S. My impression is that most Indian Americans (especially second-gen) don’t care much about the outsourcing issue purely on its merits either way. There are a lot more important things to debate. What is much more important to Indian Americans is the skill with which the candidate handles the issue. The slightest hint of xenophobic or protectionist speech in an attempt to assuage big labor (or xenophobes) pisses off the South Asian voter. Obama’s campaign figured that out the hard way earlier this year. In truth, Obama and Clinton both want desi money but they have to pocket it by staying just far enough away that they don’t come off as curry lovers. For example, earlier this month wealthy IITers held their annual alumni conference in Santa Clara. IIT + Silicon Valley = $$$. Destitute John McCain would have been there in a heart beat if invited. Clinton however, appeared by videocon. This way she could appeal to Indian Americans and get their money without pissing off big labor by actually being in a room full of foreign educated Indians. That’s some skill. The true test for Clinton (and the other Dems) lies ahead. Big labor is getting smart about her game and is begining to raise a ruckus:

… in Buffalo, the fruits of the Tata deal have been hard to find. The company, which called the arrangement Clinton’s “brainchild,” says “about 10” employees work here. Tata says most of the new employees were hired from around Buffalo. It declines to say whether any of the new jobs are held by foreigners, who make up 90% of Tata’s 10,000-employee workforce in the United States.

As for the research deal with the state university that Clinton announced, school administrators say that three attempts to win government grants with Tata for health-oriented research were unsuccessful and that no projects are imminent.

The Tata deal underscores Clinton’s bind as she attempts to lead a Democratic Party that is turning away from the free-trade policies of her husband’s administration in the 1990s and is becoming more skeptical of trade deals and temporary-worker visas. [Link]

As brown blog folks, we know a thing or two about nerdiness. I was surprised therefore to see this NYT article about the research of Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at UCSB who has been studying nerds for the past dozen years. According to the article, Bucholtz argues that nerdiness is essentially exaggerated whiteness:

Nerds - not just white people any more

Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”

As a linguist, Bucholtz understands nerdiness first and foremost as a way of using language… Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English … But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English… By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white. [Link]

I’m willing to concede part of her point - that “cool” culture in America has to do with black culture, and that nerds define themselves self-consciously against it. That’s why (as she points out) black nerd figures, like Urkel, are so amusing. It’s worth reading her whole argument, but I’m not going to quote it at greater length here because I’m more interested in what she leaves out, namely immigrant nerds or FOB nerds.

Growing up in New York City, we had nerds of all colors, sizes, shapes and flavors, but the median nerd was probably an immigrant kid of some sort. It didn’t matter where your parents came from, just that they weren’t born here and that you yourself may have emigrated as a kid.

Since I went to a geek high school, I grew up with Eastern European nerds, tons and tons of east Asian nerds, and yes, brown nerds. And it wasn’t about people defining themselves against blackness — African nerds with their white short-sleeve shirts, slacks and ramrod straight posture were just as nerdy as an IITian or MITian around. [Which is precisely why “blackness” gets tricky when talking about immigrants - are you going to call African immigrants Oreos just because they don’t fit stereotypes of “black Americans”?]

As a matter of fact, I would go as far as to argue that brown nerds aren’t hyperwhite but ultrabrown. They weren’t trying to emulate the squarer parts of American culture, in fact they were uberdesi . They wore polyester short-sleeve shirts, coke bottle glasses, were very earnest and spoke grammatical english. And yes, before somebody brings up the distinction, they were not just geeks but pukka nerds.

It’s poor form to leave a party without saying goodbye. And though for a while now I’ve done little more than relax on the porch and watch the revelers come and go, it’s time now for me to head back out into the city. I’ve had a rich and productive experience here and I thank you all for the insight and the perspectives; you’ve helped me through changes and contributed to my growth in ways you don’t know. I don’t have time to blog at this point, but there are other ways to maintain and contribute to online communities, and I look forward to running into some of you in those future settings. To everyone: Go forward with honesty, kindness, and joy in our complex and ambiguous diasporic lives. PEACE.

…because according to some commenters, apparently, it isn’t. Suddenly there are commentS about hot Desi girls choosing white guys over their own— and I emphasize the plural aspect of “comment”, because that’s what caught my attention— this wasn’t some one-off virtual rant. Frankly, Mr. Shankly, I’m shocked. While some of the people who are leaving the eyebrow-raising statements seem to be new, I’m fully aware that the normal pattern of Sepia engagement is:

Random Googling —> Sepia? What the-? —> Hmmm, interesting —> Lurking —> and then finally, posting.

If these anti-miscegenation fans have followed that tried-and-true process, then they’d be aware that there are more than a few members of the Mutiny community who are the products of interracial unions; I can’t imagine that they’d be so tactless as to disparage such pairings when they reflect someone like Siddhartha, Desidancer or SemiDesiMasala’s ancestry.

So, maybe these are just mischief-instigating trolls, having some wicked fun via drive-by hate-spewing.

Or are they?

I think there’s more to this— and that’s why I’m publishing this post. Let’s have it out, then. Some of you seem to be in the mood to REALLY tell us what you think, so here’s your deluxe chance. Almost everyone here is anonymous. :) It’s safe to be honest.

The following comments were left on my post about a woman named Aarti being chosen as one of the cuter people on the Hill:

hillside: Also I’ve never dated an Indian girl either, probably partly because so many of the hot ones like the two on this list are into white dudes. [sm]

Sheetal: (referring to comment above)
I’ve noticed this too. What is up with that? [sm]

Sheetal followed that comment by excerpting the following portion of the Hill article, making sure to highlight certain significant words by “bolding” them.

Skipper is a native of Chicago but both parents are from India — something that had worried her when it came to the issue of marriage. The handsome man in church soon became her boyfriend, but he was American and Caucasian, far from what she thought her parents would ever accept.

Okay, loud and clear. Jamie Skipper is Desi and she married a Caucasian (never mind that Desis are Caucasian, too). Yet another commenter seemed to agree with hillside and Sheetal:

I think it was Camille who originally alerted us to the horrific discovery of a baby in Bombay, who had been stabbed almost to death, before being thrown in the garbage.

A newborn Indian baby found abandoned with 26 stab wounds has survived, doctors said on Wednesday, despite a cracked skull and exposed intestines.

The baby boy, who doctors said was aged between one and two days, was discovered soaked in blood at a garbage dump in India’s financial capital of Mumbai on Tuesday, they said.

His intestines were hanging out from a deep wound on his back and he had dirt and garbage stuck on him.

“When he was brought in he looked pale from blood loss,” said Ramesh Hatti, a doctor at a city hospital.

“He is still in a lot of pain but is now stable.”

Police have not been able to trace the baby’s parents or establish a reason for the attack.

Babies are sometimes abandoned by unwed Indian mothers, who fear severe social repercussions for having a child out of wedlock. [CNN]

Today, another tipster emailed us an update— via The Mumbai Mirror:

The good news is that the infant is doing well…Dr Oak said he has been taken off the ventilator. “He is able to breathe on his own but he is too young and vulnerable to infection. So, we may keep him in the ICU for a few days,” he said.

The phone has been ringing off the hook, at the hospital.

Many callers were eager to adopt the little one. A woman called up the Mumbai Mirror office and said, “How can I adopt the baby? What is the procedure. How can I help this child?”

According to Madhuri Mhatre, a social worker with an adoption agency called Bal Anand, “Adoption takes a lot of time because we have to be sure that the child goes into a good family. We check the legal, financial and domestic background of all prospective parents.”

In any case, doctors said, it is too early to speak of adoption.

This tiny little fighter is so lucky, so fierce:

A milkman saw the bleeding child in a garbage dump outside Lokhandwala complex at Kandivli (W) on Tuesday morning. He rushed the baby to Bhagwati hospital in Borivli. But since Bhagwati was not equipped to take care of the injured infant, he was sent to B Y L Nair Hospital. Doctors carried out a two-hour operation on Tuesday night to close the wounds and replace lost blood. He was then put on a ventilator.

I get chills every time I read that. How many times did this child slip through death’s fingers…

The state government plans to inquire about the miracle baby now recuperating in B Y L Nair Hospital…

Since government-run children’s homes do not often handle newborns, the department will contact NGOs who have the expertise to do so.

“At the same time, I have instructed my officials to check out if the government-run children’s homes in Mumbai and Pune have the facilities to take care of the baby,” said Dr Singh, who is unhappy about too much publicity being given to the baby’s wounds.

Wait, why?

He says such images can cause distress among citizens.

Oh, boo-hoo. There can’t be enough publicity, if it inspires much-necessary outrage and reasserts the power of shame. The elderly and the newly-born are not garbage, to be disposed of when inconvenient.

It’s been way too long since we’ve done meetups in two of the most desi-licious cities in the US. So, mutineer A N N A and I have joined forces to coordinate our travel scheds and bring you the Sepia Mutiny Summer Road Tour - a back to back meetups in NYC & SF.

The following dates & places are still tentative but we wanted to pass y’all the heads up ASAP -

Sunday, August 26	San Francisco
3pm — ??? Café Greco (A N N A’s favorite!) 423 Columbus Ave San Francisco, CA 94133 (415) 397-6261 [Last one in SF? Sept ‘06]

You’d better believe that we’ll do our part to Help Vinay & Sameer at the meetups. Special prizes to anyone else who manages to attend *both* meetups. And, as usual, we’ll do our best to document the depravity in our flickr group.

…in a land not-at-all far away, there was a divisive issue that was almost as annoying as Paris Hilton— and just as ubiquitous, too.

According to the SAJAforum blog, yesterday, there was another cartoon on outsourcing (shocking! original! unexpected!).

This time, it’s Mother Goose & Grimm who are having their say. Well, more like Grimmy and Attila, but you know what I meant.

Do you think it’s funny?

Better yet, does anyone feel like getting creative the way our beloved DJ Drrrty Poonjabi did with the last cartoon I blogged about on this “hot topic”?

::

w00t Nina! Thanks for the prompt “revision”. :D

…that’s much better. Anyone else?

Via my Auntie Valsa’s kid, Jasmin, over at ASATA, news of an upcoming free M.I.A. show at Amoeba Records in Berkeley, this Saturday at 2pm.

I “hella” thought those of you in the yay area who have reconciled your inner turmoil regarding her connection with/representation of/grahpic allusions to the LTTE might want to know. Me? I’m still conflicted, so I’ll keep humming

Let you be superior

I’m flithy with the fury ya

…it’s easy being morally inferior when there’s such a sick soundtrack to feel shame to. I keed, I keed.

A heart-breaking update to my previous post, “On Respect for our Elders”:

A SICK 75-year-old grandmother who was thrown in the garbage by her relatives in India last week has died, officials say.

Chinnammal Palaniappan, died on Sunday in a home for elderly people where she was taken after being rescued from the garbage dump in Erode town, 400km from Chennai, capital of southern Tamil Nadu state.

Palaniappan had told her rescuers that on July 19 she was taken from her home by her grandsons and on waking up found herself among a heap of rotting garbage.

“She was improving after she was fed and given necessary medicines in the facility but on Sunday evening she developed breathing problems and died,” an official said.

Thanks for posting this to the news tab, Anonymous. At least she’s finally at peace.

If anyone hears news regarding the worthless family who did this despicable deed, please let us know. I can’t be the only one who is interested in their fate, and how the TN government proceeds with this tragic case.

I heart Bat For Lashes, which is half-brown. ;) Like the blog I am currently so addicted to, I have a massive girl-crush on Natasha Khan. This is complicated, and not just because I’m straight; it means that even though I also have ole voice of the beehive on my iPod, I’m totally going to be a bitch to her, since she is also up for a Mercury Prize, and I want my Natasha to win (no, not because she’s desi, because she rules):

Kind of like how Chan Marshall is Cat Power, Natasha Kahn is Bat for Lashes, a British singer/songwriter and visual artist whose album Fur and Gold made the short list for the 2007 Mercury Prize (but will most likely lose to Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black). Kahn is beginning to make waves on this side of the pond. She’s touring the U.S. right now with her all-girl live show lineup. [Jezebel]

The line about squash in her bio keeps summoning “The Royal Tenenbaums” to my memory, I’m random like that:

Bat for Lashes is the stage name of Natasha Khan (born 25 October 1979), a Brighton-based songwriter.

Born to a Pakistani father, part of the eminent family of squash-playing Khans, and an English mother, her early childhood was spent travelling the world following her father who trained the Pakistani squash team, summers in Pakistan, and the rest of the time in Hertfordshire[1][2]. She had a strict religious upbringing until her parents separated, when she was eleven years old. [viki]

Her next four Amreekan shows are in Chicago, Minneapolis, SF and LA. Sigh. Why couldn’t she come to Hollywood for ugly people? Oh, and FYI, she is SO not a creepy Lily Allen. That is like, sooo mean.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go cry, which is what I always do after watching this video, but only because it reminds me of my beloved BMX, which got stolen when I was seven. That and those stuffed animal heads haunt my nightmares.

This has been forwarded to me ~15 times and you are all right, it’s some seriously funny shiznit. “Yo Momma” is an MTV series that looks for the best trash talkers around the country. I watched last season end to end (ah, the miracle of Tivo) and it was ridiculously good. This time around, the show’s been infiltrated by a desi dude who’s donned the character “Pak Attack” and if he can keep the gimmick going, he’s actually got what it takes to go all the way & win the show.

You smell so bad that people would rather sit next to me on an airplane…

In this clip over at MTV.com, he DESTROYS his yo momma competitor, Osa. Set aside ~10 min of your life to watch a Russell Peters worthy performance. Except, of course, there’s a much higher improv quotient here & Pak’s strictly amateur. (His myspace page indicates that in real life, he’s probably a GeorgiaTech engineer. )

Now I’ll warn you, gentle mutineers, that there’s a certain brand of humor you’ve gotta be ready to accept on any show called “Yo Momma”… with that caveat in mind, a couple of Pak’s laugh lines -

“It is true, it is true, I work at 7-11, but just like my store, yo momma’s legs are open 24-7”

“The only difference between my camel and your momma, my camel spits”

Social commentary?

The Hill has more beautiful people for us, 40 more, in fact. The first one caught tipster DTK’s attention (thanks!).

Aarti Nayak, scheduler for Rep. Julia Carson (D-Ind.), doesn’t like skiing one bit, but that’s where she met her husband, Dave — on the slopes.

“He had a little blond girlfriend at the time,” she says with a wry smile. But when Nayak came into the picture, well, the blond was history. They have been married since September. She hopes to have kids.

Considering today’s hot comment threads/topics, it seems appropriate to wonder what kind of wedding they had?

Was it meant to be? Nayak reads astrological signs, although she’s not a fervent believer.

During college at Virginia Tech, she and a friend wrote blurbs on astrological signs for the Eccentric, a student newspaper — they were called the “psychic sisters.”

At any rate, she doesn’t look one bit “psychic.”

What the H-E-double-toothpicks does a “psychic” look like? Enough with this paranormal profiling!

The first-generation American from an Indian family twirls her dark, curly hair, which her friends have compared to singer-model Toni Braxton’s locks.

Let me channel “chip-on-her-shoulder-Auntie”: “Vy they had to compare her to Toni Braxton? Minnie Driver also has such hair! Harrumph! Racist!” ;)

But makeup is not very important to her.

“I don’t care anymore,” she explains.

Even about lipgloss?? Say it isn’t so, my sweet sister…perhaps you just need some Hindu lips.

When it comes to beauty, Nayak is gently scornful of contests and pageants. She said one of their past interns participated in pageants and waved the Miss America wave.

“Who are these girls anyway?” she asks skeptically.

Oh, and as for her auspicious placement at the top of the list:

Other than the Top 10 , the rest of these beautiful people are not ranked in any specific order.

Suuuuuuuuuure they aren’t.

Apologies to Billy Idol, but a recent article in the Washington Post about local weddings has me thinking in the abstract (I’m as far from the lavan as I have ever been) about wedding customs and how they change.

The article makes a number of interesting points. It starts by describing how non-desis have discovered the business opportunities involved in brown weddings, such as Sue Harmon who has two white mares specially reserved for baraat duty, or Foxchase Manor which has learned how to handle the havan without setting off all the fire alarms:

“The normal instinct is to blow out the fire when you’re done … But that creates this huge puff of smoke that’s actually much bigger than when the fire is lit. So the key is to keep the fire in a portable container, and then when you’re done, you carry it outside and close all the doors before blowing it out.” With an average of 80 South Asian weddings a year, the staff has had ample opportunity to perfect the technique, he added. [Link]

Still more interesting to me was a story of how other “ethnic” couples have adapted some aspects of desi ceremonies:

Why wear white?

South Asian vendors, meanwhile, are increasingly hearing from non-South Asian couples who want to borrow their customs. Caucasian couples who came across photos of Sood’s creations … have asked her to decorate their weddings in the same shades of maroon and gold. She’s even draped a mandap — the wedding canopy — with kente cloth for an African couple… [Link]

But the bit that really caught my attention was about how ABDs are wanting to have hybrid wedding ceremonies that incorporate aspects of the white weddings they grew up watching on television:

Perhaps most radical, however, is the growing use of whites and ivories in the decorations. “In Indian culture, white signifies mourning,” she said. “It used to be such a taboo for weddings. But now so many brides are demanding it.”

Priti Loungani-Malhotra, 32, a dressmaker based in Arlington County, has even designed a white version of the classic Indian wedding gown, with a mermaid-shaped lengha, or skirt, that would do Vera Wang proud. [Link]

I always thought precisely those two aspects of western weddings - the procession down the isle and the white dress / black tux were boring and dull compared to the circumambulation of holy objects (at least in some desi weddings) and bright red wedding garments. I know I’m a guy, and the long walk down the isle brings attention to the bride, but I just never liked it. For one thing, I don’t like the parts of either culture that view a woman as something to be given from one man (the father) to another (the husband).

How many of you would (or did) seize control of your wedding from your parents and create a wedding ceremony that incorporated aspects of both cultures? Are you all more enamoured of white wedding customs than I am?

Several of you have written to us regarding the grand opening of Canada’s Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha Shri Swaminarayan Mandir (that was fun to type!). The pictures, which you can view in a slideshow here, are gorgeous. Were any Canadian mutineers there on July 22? If so, please let us know, below.

After 18 months of construction and millions in fundraising efforts, a one-of-a-kind Hindu temple opened Sunday in Toronto.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was on-hand to celebrate the official unveiling of the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir.

Harper said the $40 million architectural marvel represents India’s and Canada’s embracement of spiritual and ethnic pluralism.

“Canada’s accommodation of diversity is not without precedent,” Harper said, addressing a large crowd.

“There have been forerunners — and of these perhaps none is as note-worthy as India.”

Located at Hwy 427 and Finch Avenue in north-west Toronto, the temple is an architectural masterpiece. Built with Turkish limestone and Italian marble, the temple was built by artisans armed with chisels, hammers and ancient Hindu doctrine outlining how a holy place should be constructed. [CTV.ca]

By the numbers:

-24,000: the number of pieces sculpted in India, marked with a barcode and then reassembled to create the mandir.

-July 22, 2007: official opening

-$40 million: cost of construction, majority of which came from the community

-400: the number of volunteers who devoted their time to such an awesome project.

::

As giddy as such architectural perfection makes me, my inner %$#@< is wondering if Dubya would have made like Harper, had this mandir been constructed somewhere in this great nation…

The Greatest Living American?

The greatest living American is Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and joins Jimmy Carter as the two living American-born laureates around whose necks this distinction as been placed.

How did Borlaug win his Nobel back in 1970?

Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India’s food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes.

As a temporary American expat to India, Borlaug’s impact on India’s development was possibly greater than Deming’s on Japan…

Please. Spare us your liberal Western Judeo-Christian BS. Hinduism is far superior when it comes to questions of individual growth and development. For example, we don’t consider death a chance to go to happy land up in the sky, so that article about the baby is total BS. Life and death are part of the same cycle for us. A wife is subservient to her husband because Sita was subservient to Ram. Yeah, a Westerner may not understand that, but at least in India we don’t need to place condom machines in every university bathroom. We don’t have a whole porn industry devoted to the exploitation of vulnerable women. We don’t put our elders in nursing homes because of an obsession with career promotion. We value our families, and just as importantly, the larger community. And Hindu women have done just fine for 5000+++ years, thank you very much. So cut this feminist BS. Next you’ll be promoting gay rights in India. Liberalism is NOT going to destroy the fabric of our society. [sm]

I volunteered at a nursing home while attending college in the US. Many of the elderly women told me that their children visit only during holidays. Most of the day, these elderly people would be playing cards, or watching television or some such activity. But even though these children had neglected their parents, parents being parents, the parents (even with all the amnesia and what not) would remember their kids and often reminisce, out of the blue.

When I see young Indian kids walking around with their grandparents, I can appreciate the harmony of Indian culture. I know that that venerable revered being will not have to extinguish his/her days, sitting around a table playing cards or wait for the next holiday to see a family member. There is something more important trying to outwit your husband in every aspect (feminism), and I would have to say that this is the image of you that you project onto your children. After all, a parents are a child’s first role models. [sm]

When the desi nursing homes actually materialize, then we can debate it…Have you been in a nursing home? Have you seen the size of one of the cramped rooms they have for occupants? Its disgusting. Desi’s will never go down that path, thankfully. [sm]

::

Via an Anonymous Tipster:

Indian granny thrown on garbage dump

An Indian couple found an unwell 75-year-old woman lying on a garbage dump, apparently thrown out of her home by her daughter and grandsons who did not want to take care of her, the Hindustan Times reported.

“She never complained about her family’s behaviour, only rued the fact that she couldn’t move without help,” Mohanasundari, one of the rescuers, said.

While I do not hold a naive and idealistic view of the Indian government, I was still saddened to recently hear about the extent to which the GOI has gotten into bed with the odious dictators of Burma. Is this really much different from US-Pakistani relations? Both are justified by realpolitik, national interest, and claims that the end justifies the means.

In this case, India is circumventing the EU arms embargo on Burma by selling them attack helicopters made from EU parts:

Last week, India sparked fresh cries of outrage from human rights groups when a report surfaced saying that it plans to sell an unknown number of sophisticated Advanced Light Helicopters (ALH) to Burma (also known as Myanmar).

According to a report by Amnesty International and other international organizations, the helicopters should be covered by the embargo because they are made with components from at least six EU countries and the United States… the Advanced Light Helicopters include rocket launchers from Belgium, engines from France, brake systems from Italy, fuel tanks and gearboxes from Britain. [Link]

Nor is it the first time - India has made several weapons sales to Burma in the last few years. [Note - India has neither confirmed nor denied the helicopter sale] The Burmese government is the kind of government that is perfectly willing to attack and kill its own civilians to maintain its grip on power, so selling weapons to the Burmese junta is serious business.

What does India get from this? Just like the USA, India arms and supports dictators so they can help India with its security problems:

India says it needs Burma’s help. There are at least 20,000 guerrillas from five major militant groups in India’s northeast - all fighting the Indian government for sovereignty or independence - who have training camps in the dense jungles of Sagaing in northern Burma. New Delhi has been deliberating with Yangon over plans for a military offensive against such groups.

Counterinsurgency operations in India’s northeast, says an official from India’s Ministry of Defense under conditions of anonymity, cannot succeed unless neighboring countries refrain from supporting the separatist groups based on their territories. [Link]

And of course, trade in general between India and Burma is increasing, as is Indian investment in Burmese gas even though the Burmese government is notorious for using forced labor when building pipelines and other infrastructure.

StrategyPage has always had great coverage of all things military in South Asia. With all the ink and pixels being spilled about all the things going wrong on Pakistan’s unruly border with Afghanistan, Stratpage has this report of one of the tactics that’s working relatively well -

Pakistani soliders are faced with suicide attackers who “love death more than you love your 5,000-rupee salary, nude pictures of Indian actresses and liquor.” [link]; But that’s part of the plan.

The army can defeat the tribesmen in battle, but it’s guerilla warfare where the tribes have always had an edge. But that edge as disappeared as the tribes became more dependent on outside goods, moved by truck over a few roads. For thousands of years in the past, the tribes were self-sufficient in their mountain valleys. Now, the tribes suffer when the army sets up checkpoints on those roads, and forces the tribesmen to attack the better armed and disciplined soldiers…

When Thomas Friedman turned the memorable phrase, The World is Flat, he was popularizing trends in globalization that many have observed for decades. First, that in modern capitalism, economic transactions now span a larger and larger portion of the world - Pakistani tribals might not be able to place Finland or Korea on a map but they are probably getting accustomed to the convenience of a cellphone. Second - and to the consternation of the Arundhati Roy’s, Naomi Kleins, et. al., the mutually beneficial, non-violent, uncompelled transaction inherent to economic exchange necessarily impacts the cultures on both sides. Certain shared cultural norms are necessary to support a transaction and it’s nearly impossible in the long run to get the benefits of a transaction without being at least partially infected by the new culture.

Thomas Barnett, in analyzing the 21st century faultlines, placed them not between Civilizations but rather between those successfully Integrating and those Not Integrating into the global rule set - namely economics & globalziation. The activities of the Pakistani military along this faultline thus paint a great picture of what multifaceted war can / should look like. Trade has clearly run through the region for centuries but only recently does it involve such day to day pedestrian and yet inherently global goods like AA batteries, gasoline, and the like…

Said Vishal on our News Tab:

Not a story this, but…A farmer passes bunches of paddy to another to sow in a field at Kunwarpur village near Allahabad on Saturday, July 21, 2007. Beautiful. Courtesy : Hindustan Times.

Hey, it’s okay that it isn’t a “story”; it’s an evocative photograph and you know what THAT means— it’s time to play caption that picture! Have at it, Mutineers. :)

Previous editions of the game: onnu, randu, moonnu, naalu. (I’m always struck by how different those are from ek, do, teen, char…)

Though I have never been a fan of Harry, I have always been an ardent devotee of pop culture, so Potter-mania interests me for that reason. I’m marinating in it here, but I’m tickled by what’s going on there, and by there, I mean India.

By 7 am, Strand Book Stall, Fort, Mumbai, who opened their doors at 6.30 am sharp on July 21, had sold 2,000 copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Queues of excited Potterwallahs, who had been in line since 6 am or earlier, wound themselves around the block in this busy Mumbai business district, where Saturday is usually a very quiet day.

Mothers and daughters, teenagers, young working people, plenty of youngsters with their parents and lot of oldies. all stood in a queue calmly clutching receipts for copies booked up to three months earlier.

The paan wallahs and chai wallahs nearby had seen this phenomenon before. “Yes it is for that book,” they said sagely. “I don’t know what the book is about.” [Rediff]

That is almost exactly what I said to a stranger, earlier today! ;)

And you muggle-borns? Did you skip to the last page, like the rowdy teens in Mumbai did?

In latex, India’s women should trust (thanks, Jeet). So much for treating one’s husband as if they were a deity, hmmm? Via TimesNow.TV:

Women’s welfare minister, Renuka Chowdhury, has asked women to trust condoms more than their husbands.

Chowdhury commented on Monday (July 16) that Indian men can’t be trusted in their sexual behaviour. According to Chowdhury, men also play a pivotal role in fuelling the country’s HIV epidemic – so women, she said, should protect themselves by keeping condoms as straying husbands might bring the virus home.

I’m sure that will go over VERY well.”Honey, I don’t trust you and these business trip-ships you are always having. Please be covering up, thank you, come again”. (Oh, like you could have resisted that last bit…it’s Rahul’s influence, I tell you.)

“Half our problems stem from hypocrisy. We women are too shy to ask our husbands to use a condom. At one time it was considered immoral to even use the word. People still feel reluctant to say it. And this shyness costs women dearly,” she said.

Whenever I read the word “shyness”, I think…

Shyness is nice, and Shyness can stop you From doing all the things in life You’d like to So, if there’s something you’d like to try If there’s something you’d like to try ASK ME - I WON’T SAY “NO” - HOW COULD I ?

Ah, that was lovely. If women in India take Renuka’s advice, here’s hoping that last sentence is what they are met with, in response.

“Men can’t be trusted and everyone knows this,” she said adding “with due apologies and exemptions to the current company - most husbands can’t be trusted at different levels. They stay away from home for work purposes for long periods, often falling prey to temptation and then making their wives also victims. The onus lies on women to stop the deadly disease (AIDS).”

The onus lies on WOMEN? What, like we don’t already have enough to do? Chey! OUR TO-DO LISTS NEVER END!

…a move to introduce sex education at the school level has been net with stiff resistance from many politicians, with several state governments opposing it saying it will go against Indian culture - and this has also been a big headache for Chowdhury.

Wait, what kind of resistance was sex ed met with? ;)

Renuka Chowdhury’s refreshing candour is perhaps more indicative of the emerging Indian woman - and stands at odds with some of the more conservative, regressive views that have been voiced by some of our mass leaders who seem to be out of touch with reality…

Out of touch with reality, indeed. Read on, for what inspired the title, picture and my general silliness…

Madhya Pradesh School Education Minister Narottam Mishra even suggested “Instead of imparting sex education to school students, they will be taught yoga.”

Fantastic. Then everyone will be flexible, in great shape AND in the mood to knock Batas. Perrrfect.

Pahtee In Thee Ghe-tto…

One of the best things about summer in San Francisco is the annual Stern Grove summer concert series. The festival brings in some of the best in lesser known music with a particular emphasis on international / world beats.

This Sunday they’re doing it up Desi and will feature the Grammy-nominated Anoushka Shankar, Karsh Kale, The Non-Stop Bhangra Collective, Dholrhythms, and more.

Where: Stern Grove Park

When: Sunday, July 22; Concert starts @ 2:00 but seating is first come / first serve and once they’re at capacity, they stop admitting new folks. So be there by 1230 or so just to be safe.

And, of course, no gathering of Desi’s this large is complete without an obligatory shout out for folks to come out get their cheeks swabbed and help Sameer & Vinay find a bone marrow match. Sameer’s team is looking for volunteers to help out with the cause. I’ll be there with a few other mutineers so stop by and say hello!

Super cute high jinks, brought to you by DJ Drrrty Poonjabi, the BBC and the letter S. :)

A seagull has turned shoplifter by wandering into a shop and helping itself to crisps. The bird walks into the RS McColl newsagents in Aberdeen when the door is open and makes off with cheese Doritos…

Shop assistant Sriaram Nagarajan said: “Everyone is amazed by the seagull. For some reason he only takes that one particular kind of crisps.”

The bird first swooped in Aberdeen’s Castlegate earlier this month and made off with the 55p crisps, and is now a regular.

Look, he even shares!

Once outside, the crisps are ripped open and the seagull is joined by other birds.

Clever birdie…

Mr Nagarajan said: “He’s got it down to a fine art. He waits until there are no customers around and I’m standing behind the till, then he raids the place.

“At first I didn’t believe a seagull was capable of stealing crisps. But I saw it with my own eyes and I was surprised. He’s very good at it.

“He’s becoming a bit of a celebrity. Seagulls are usually not that popular but Sam is a star because he’s so funny.”

Happy Friday, Mutineers. Join us next week, when Sam is kidnapped by Britney, and trained to retrieve funyuns and altoids, y’all (for Sean Preston, of course).

Like all lal-blooded desi girls, I’m mildly obsessed with eyebrows.

Like all lal-blooded GIRLS, I’m mildly obsessed with celeb gossip.

Occasionally, the two, they meet.

It is possible that many of you saw photographs of Sienna Miller on the red carpet (there she is! on the right!), doing her damnedest to bring dark and furry back. Well, ABC News was inspired by her “caterpillars”; they have an entire article about what brows signify and the expert whom they quote is none other than Vaishaly Patel, “London’s eyebrow shaper to the stars”.

Vaishaly’s opinion on Sienna’s dark statement?

“Personally I think they look hideous…When you’ve got blond hair the number one rule is not to have black eyebrows. I think they’re a lovely shape but just on the wrong person.”

So, there is a right person.

Take heart, my brown sisters— YOU are that right person!

Bushy is back as far as eyebrows are concerned. So, poor Sienna was just trying to follow fashion. It’s just that not every fashion suits everyone.

Ah, for once, we (and by we, I mean you) win.

For this apparently lowbrow issue, there’s some highbrow analysis. Eyebrows tell a story of cultures, eras and politics. For example, in Iran “un-groomed” is a sign of virginity. The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sported a unibrow. It became her signature, an expression of independence and feminist strength.

No comment on what brows meant to Bert, and that’s unfortunate.

There is plenty of history-lite, however, including an exploration of whether certain decades inspired severe arches or fierce tufts. Here’s a summary:

-1940s-50s: Eyebrows are shaved off completely, lest a girl seem “masculine”. Owwww.

-1960s: Girls who are boys, who like boys to be girls, who do boys like they’re girls, who do girls like they’re boys— always should be someone you reeeeally love. Free love = furriness.

-1980s: Yuppies are mean and therefore, women over-tweeze. The end.

-Today: Sensitive and enlightened are we. Pluck we do not.

There’s a backlash against the over-plucked brow, according to Jaimineey Patel, manager of a Blink Eyebrow Bar in London. Patel and a phalanx of eyebrow “threaders” are in the trenches, persuading clients to grow back their brows before they gently shape them with twisted thread held between their teeth.

“We always do a thorough consultation,” explained Patel. “We ask them what they want out of their eyebrows.” What can you want from an eyebrow? More than function, apparently. More than a sponge effect to keep sweat out of your eyes.

We want to be as pretty as can be, DUH.

Apparently they frame your face. “To be honest,” confided Patel. “A lot of clients feel they’ve had a facelift because it opens your eyes out.”

I don’t know about a facelift, but I saw someone get their brows done for the first time this weekend, and suddenly, I was aware of the rare color of their irises AND their ridonkulous lashes. Yowza. Best $25 they ever spent, yindeed.

Eyebrows are the new window on the soul. So be careful Sienna, those caterpillars may reveal more than you want us to know.

New?! Not. Desis have known that truth all along. As for Sienna’s caterpillars, like Madonna and Gwen before her, the girl just wants to be down with the brown, obviously.

Almost 20,000 have been registered but we don’t have a match yet… NYC mutineers can do their part this weekend at Pianos bar [158 Ludlow b/t Rivington & Stanton] on Sunday, July 22.

If you’ve already registered, go again & bring a friend. Either way, the last event was, to put it mildly, a hoot. This time around, Rashmi and Reena (Vinay & Sameer’s wives respectively) will both be in attendance and will certainly appreciate the show of support.

And, as with last time around, Sepia Mutiny’s “send us a good swabbing pict and we’ll put you on the homepage” offer still stands. Do Good, have fun, and help your marriage / dating / social prospects by getting your mug in front of SM’s vast & cultured readership - not a bad deal

…on behalf of three misguided hecklers (thanks, Anonymous). I guess I wasn’t the only Christian who was saddened by the actions of a few fringe-dwellers. See? Team Jesus isn’t totally teh suck. :)

Via Rediff:

Zed told rediff.com from his home in Reno, Nevada, “I’ve received nearly 100 e-mails — and most of them from total strangers and I don’t know how they got my e-mail address — apologising for the disruption of my prayer by some of these Christian fundamentalists.”

He said many of these e-mails had said, “I am also a Christian but I don’t appreciate what happened with those people protesting, and I apologise for their misguided actions.”

“They also congratulated me for my prayer and for being the first Hindu chaplain to open a US Senate session,” he said.

He said that he had also received some e-mails from some Congressional aides who had also apologised for the disruption by these persons purporting to be from a group calling themselves Operation Save America, a Christian right-wing organisation.

What’s more wicked: intolerance or humbly offering a prayer?

The protestors shouted from the gallery, among other things, ‘Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight.’

They should ask for forgiveness for being obnoxious.

Zed said he had not received a single hate mail “or any kind of nasty mail at all. I have not got any negative mail or correspondence.”

So, goodness prevailed. More goodness? Recognizing that Hindus are just as American as anyone else and deserve to be treated as such. As long as prayers do open the Senate, they should be inclusive, to accurately reflect the various faiths that a Senator’s constituents practice. It’s only polite. And right:

Meanwhile, the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, DC, wrote letters to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, who facilitated Zed’s prayer in the Senate, and to the Senate Chaplain Barry C Black congratulating them for facilitating the first Hindu prayer in the Senate and bemoaning the unfortunate incident of the protest by the members of the Christian right-wing outfit…

“We are writing to express how much we deeply appreciate your efforts to insure that the tradition of opening Senate sessions with prayer remains a process that not only accurately reflects the diversity of our great country, but which celebrates that religious diversity as one of our greatest strengths.”

I eagerly await irrational and inapposite comments which ask, “But…where are the apologetic emails to Graham Staines’ loved ones from Hindus, who should be collectively responsible for his brutal murder? Huh??” Oh, wait…I don’t. Such comments are not germane (or logical for that matter).

Similarly, Christians aren’t collectively to blame for the rude, disrespectful outburst which interrupted Zed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t express our sorrow and disagreement with such behavior. All that is necessary for the triumph of fundamentalism is that good people do nothing. Whatsoever we sow, we shall also reap. If we sow intolerance and disrespect, what else are we going to be shown by others? And would we deserve anything else?

An interesting set of stats posted on the SM news tab talks about workforce participation amongst South Asians in the UK -

Six million Britons are living in households where nobody works - costing the taxpayer almost £13 billion a year in benefits alone, a spending watchdog report reveals today.

…The problem is concentrated in cities including inner London - where one in four households are workless - Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, and is worse among some ethnic groups. Pakistani and Bangladeshi households are the most likely to be workless at 22.3 per cent, while Indian households are the least likely, at 6.8 per cent.

Internationally Britain has one of the worst rates of worklessness. Around 13.5 per cent of the UK population live in workless households, compared with compared with 11 per cent in France, five per cent in the United States and less than 3 per cent in Japan.

For next door neighbors to be both the worst and the first on this sort of distribution is pretty interesting. Anyone (Razib?) know what diffs in immigration patterns b/t Pakistani & Bangladeshi’s vs. Indian’s to the UK might be?

With all the brouhaha about outsourcing last election season, I thought this article provided an interesting snapshot of what techie outsourcing looks like today -

Silicon Valley has helped power India’s outsourcing boom by shifting technology jobs to that country. Three months ago, Munjal Shah reversed a bit of that shift.

Shah, who leads a California start-up called Riya Inc., had opened an office in India’s technology capital of Bangalore in 2005, hiring about 20 skilled software developers. The lure was the wage level: just a quarter of what experienced Silicon Valley computer engineers make.

Then Indian salaries soared. Last year, Shah paid his engineers in India about half of Silicon Valley levels. By early this year, it was 75%.

75% of an average US Engineering salary goes FAR in India. Nevertheless, the big picture point remains true — salaries eventually normalize around productivity and, given the fiercly competitive global tech market, infinite pools of 3rd world workers aren’t exactly lying in wait (of course, the right policy mistakes can make this happen, but let’s not go there for now). It is, on the otherhand, pretty impressive and a testament to modern tech + capitalism that it’s happened this fast.

My company, Roundbox, has some similar, interesting anecdotal experience with outsourcing…

Just a gentle reminder that it’s still on like Donkey Kong:

Houston has many South Asian artists, musicians, and other creative individuals who never seem to get the type of attention that their counterparts in New York, L.A., and D.C. receive. This summer it’s time to change all that. Join us on Thursday, July 19th from 8:30-11:00 p.m. at the new downtown venue “Bar Bollywood” (basement of the Butterfly High Lounge) for a FREE night of Spoken Word, Live Music, and Visual Arts. DJ Raj Swift will also be on hand to lay down the backbeat.

If you are an artist of any kind and want to perform (especially a spoken word, literary, or dance piece) or just want more information, then email abhi [at] sepiamutiny.com ASAP.

Although this event is meant to spotlight South Asian artists, ALL are welcome and encouraged to attend. Spread the word.

Finally, Roopa Vasan will be on hand to cheek swab people for the South Asian Bone Marrow Registry in hopes of finding a match to save her cousin Vinay’s life.

Bar Bollywood
902 Capitol Street
Houston, TX 77002

We’ve also added a stand-up comic to the line-up. If you are still interested in performing please email me (and keep spreading the word)!

First Matthew Shepherd. Now Satendar Singh???

Satendar Singh, a 26-year-old Fiji national who had won a visa to the United States through the immigration lottery, died July 5 at Mercy San Juan Medical Center near Sacramento, Calif., after a four-day struggle to recover from head trauma he suffered July 1 following what has been described as a hate crime at Lake Natoma…

Singh, who was picnicking July 1 with six friends of Fijian and Indian descent at a picnic area near Lake Natoma, was fatally injured in an assault during what witnesses told the Sacramento Bee was an ugly verbal attack laced with racist and homophobic slurs…

Despite his last name, Singh wore neither a turban nor a beard, aside from a small goatee. As he and his friends settled in to enjoy an early Fourth of July celebration, the Russian men began making several racial and homophobic remarks to Singh.

“I’m not pretty sure, but I think (Singh) responded by saying he wasn’t a gay,” one of Singh’s friends who witnessed the incident and who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, told India-West. “I told them we had come to enjoy the day and that we didn’t want to get into a fight or something, and I thought it was all over…”

“They were targeting him because Satendar was dancing to Indian music throughout the rest of the day, like the rest of us…I don’t know what (the Russians) were saying or if Satendar said something back, but then it happened,” the witness said.[Link]

Whether or not Singh was gay isn’t clear, nor does it matter in the event the motive turns out to be homophobia. Elizabeth Edwards, who was campaigning for her husband in the Bay Area, used the opportunity to cite Singh in a speech railing against President Bush’s inaction on hate crime legislation:

Elizabeth Edwards told a prominent gay rights group Saturday night that her husband, presidential candidate John Edwards, would help repeal more than a thousand laws that discriminate against same-sex couples…

The next day, her husband, John Edwards, said her position surprised even him. The former North Carolina Sen. opposes gay marriage but supports civil unions.

Citing the story of a Sacramento man who died after witnesses said he was beaten to death by men who thought he was gay, Edwards slammed President Bush for not doing anything to help protect gays and lesbians against violence.

“This president talks a lot about good and evil and the need to seek out evil doers,” she told a packed auditorium. “But he doesn’t seem to recognize the evil in hate crimes. The right to live without the fear of being murdered for whom we love is not a special right…” [Link]

What I find really peculiar about this story is that there doesn’t seem to be any effort to verify if he was really gay, or simply stereotyped as gay because he was “dancing to Indian music.” If dancing to Indian music makes one gay then it’s something we ought to know, right? Here is another article with the glaring headline: “Gay Immigrant Satendar Singh Killed in Holiday Hate Crime.” Regardless, there is now an effort to update the laws:

“If the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department asked for help from the federal government in this case, federal law enforcement officials could get involved if the crime turns out to be motivated by racial bias, but not if it was prompted only by anti-LGBT bias,” said Kors. “That gross inconsistency needs to change.”

Last week, Assembly member Mike Eng introduced Assembly Joint Resolution 29, sponsored by EQCA, which calls on the federal government to support the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Also known as the Matthew Shepard Act, the federal measure would expand the nation’s hate crimes protections to include sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. It would also boost local law enforcement tools and resources to investigate and prosecute acts of violence against all protected communities of people. [Link]

Ummmm.

An Indian firm has launched a paan-flavoured condom designed to evoke the pungent taste of the betel nut and tobacco concoction chewed and then spat out by millions of South Asians, newspapers reported on Tuesday. [Link]

Yeah, so like, is this so women will chew it and spit it out? So…many…jokes…cannot…type. I mean seriously, do we really want a condom to taste like something that you typically chew for an hour and grind down to a pulp? What if one acts instinctively when the aroma begins to entoxicate (although paan makes me want to vomit)? Well, at least nobody gonna mess with the prostitues who will be the test market for this product:

The company ran taste tests with sex workers, including prototypes with chocolate, banana and strawberry flavours, but the paan flavour came out tops…

The condoms will at first be made available only to prostitutes, but will we launched to the general public in a few months, the newspaper said. [Link]

I know some of you guys are thinking what I’m thinking but I am going to just come out and say it. Think I can bid for these on Ebay? During the limited release trial period the prostitutes would make a whole lot more money selling these to paan-flavored condom collectors like me, than they would using these with their clients. We’d both be winners. They’d get to skip work for a long time and I’d have something really cool for show-and-tell the next time I have a party.

Dirty Mouths Come Clean.

For years now the Bush Administration has been drubbing it into our impressionable little minds that Iraq is the “Central front in the War on Terror.” Today, the newly released key findings of the latest National Intelligence Estimate disabuses us of any such false impression:

We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership. Although we have discovered only a handful of individuals in the United States with ties to al-Qa’ida senior leadership since 9/11, we judge that al-Qa’ida will intensify its efforts to put operatives here.

Got that? Everyone clear? The Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are now the agreed upon (at least by our intelligence community) central front in this “War on Terror.” That is the reason we are starting to pour money into there. Well, I thought it was clear but there was still some confusion at today’s White House Press briefing:

Q Fran, is it a fair reading of the key judgments that you released today that the federally administered tribal areas you discussed is, in fact, the central front in the war on terrorism, to use the President’s phrase? And, if so, tell us how, if at all, you have renegotiated your own operational arrangements with General Musharraf, President Musharraf, so that we would have greater access in there.

MS. TOWNSEND: Okay. Well, to use the President’s phrase, Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. And —

Q Is that supported by the key judgments, then?

MS. TOWNSEND: There is no question, based on the statements of bin Laden, himself, not to mention others and al-Qa’ida , that they regard Iraq as the central front in the war on terror. [Link]

Well sure, if you conflate the group “al-Qa’ida in Iraq” (a newly formed group that didn’t even exist until recently and only looks for inspiration from the original) with the original al-Qa’ida. It’s not like most of the American public cares about the very important difference (which is what the administration counts on). NPR had a great wrap up on all of this.

And here is a rather pleasant thought from the briefing:

Q Is it shorthanding it too much to say that General Musharraf, through his efforts in the tribal areas there against al Qaeda, is the key person, the point man in protecting the United States, and whether he has success there or not is the whole ball game?… [Link]

KXB is one sharp, articulate, distinguished mutineer— which is why I hardly expected to find that HE deposited the hot gossip on our news tab! I love people who defy expectations, especially when they provide us with such apposite summer entertainment while doing so. Yay KXB!

Padma Lakshmi might be dating a billionaire?

Of whom we have never

Whom we have never

One who ain’t famous??

Via NYC’s other other paper:

Billionaire Ted Forstmann has trained his gaze on another world-class beauty.

The financier, whose consorts have included Elizabeth Hurley and Princess Diana, has become a fast friend of model, chef and actress Padma Lakshmi.

Their mouthpieces maintain that the two are not dating. But that hasn’t stopped some from noticing that Forstmann has appeared in Lakshmi’s life just as her husband, author Salman Rushdie, is leaving it.

Allegedly, the two are spending time together because IMG (Forstmann’s own!) will be representing her.

As early as this week, we hear, IMG is due to announce a slate of endorsement and licensing projects for Lakshmi. “IMG is global, and so is Padma’s appeal,” says one insider. “It’s a good marriage.”

Did someone say marriage?

The proof isn’t in the picture!

Lakshmi seemed a little guarded when she and Forstmann arrived together at the Elie Wiesel Foundation tribute to Oprah Winfrey at the Waldorf in May. When a photographer snapped her with Forstmann, Lakshmi asked the photog to delete the image - supposedly because the shot was blurry. She agreed to pose again - but not with Forstmann.

Rushdie suggested in a statement this month that Lakshmi was the one who wanted out of their union - that he “agreed to divorce … because of her desire to end their marriage.”

For those who think some of us are finding this mirchier than we need to:

Though he’s seven years older than Sir Salman, Forstmann seems well fixed to counsel the shapely author of “Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet.”

One industry source does find it “a little odd that Teddy is taking such an interest in Padma’s career. It’s not the side of the business he usually focuses on.”

But, perhaps in the case of Lakshmi, he’s more willing to be hands-on.

Ba-dum-bum. :D

I haven’t had much occasion to travel long distances by car lately, so I haven’t really noticed the motel signs that say “American Owned.” Coach D posted about how she boycotted such places on her vacation:

I had adamently refused to stay anywhere that had on it’s sign “American Owned”.

Big D argued well,”What if it turns out they’re not some local dicks trying to cash in on being white in the post 9-11 south? What if they’re naturalized citizens from someplace else and they’re taking advantage of the whole ‘American owned’ movement by putting that on their sign? They are AMERICAN, right?”

“But then they’re feeding that whole line of racist thought, they’re promoting the xenophobic tourist and racist/anti-immigrant mindset. Fuck that shit. I ain’t giving them my money if they put that shit on their sign.” [Link]

This is an issue for the owner of the Route66motels.com website as well, a website designed to encourage travellers on Route 66 to stay at mom-and-pop motels, but which refuses to list any motels that say “American Owned”:

Q. So what are the standards?

A. There are three. First, no vermin. Second, it has to be clean. This means no visible dirt and no weird smells. Third, no motel advertising itself as “AMERICAN OWNED” will ever be listed on this site. Period. No exceptions.

Q. What’s wrong with saying the motel is American-owned? Isn’t that just being patriotic?

A. No. It would be patriotic to fly an American flag or put up a sign that says something like “Support our troops” or “God bless the U.S.A.” The phrase “American owned” has a racist connotation. … There is no legitimate reason to advertise one’s pedigree on a billboard or in front of a business. [Link]

I had no idea this was going on, but it was easy enough to find motel signs (from delightfully cheesy motels) of places that do it. Click on the photo to be taken to the original on Flickr, it’s far larger and prettier.

I’m with Coach D on this issue - I would never stay at a motel that says “American Owned and Operated” in big letters outside. If they’re non-desis, then I don’t think they really want my business - I wouldn’t expect them to treat me well. And if they’re desis, then they might not want me around lest I scare off the @$$holes they’ve attracted as clients. Either way, I imagine I would be treated poorly. Why not take my money somewhere else?

If I were an intelligence analyst for a top secret government agency, I would be levelling forests writing memos that said one thing — Musharraf is in trouble now. Why is he in trouble, you ask? Because the opposition has an anthem, and it’s a catchy one.

Any good revolution needs a good song. It’s probably not enough to win; I’m sure there have been revolutions with great anthems that were flattened by the state. And it may not be necessary either, but I’ve gotta tell you, it really helps. A good song serves to rally people around. It provides a constant reminder of the cause, of the struggle. It sneakily undermines the authority of the state every time somebody hums a few bars and is overheard, and it gives courage to those who are wavering. In short, it’s a mistake to underestimate the importance of song when making a revolution. I mean this in a painfully earnest way, there are no smileys here.

The title of the song is “Why doesn’t uncle (i.e. Musharraf) take off his uniform and go home.”

Sung a cappella in Punjabi, it was recorded by religious students in the style of a Punjabi folk song, but its tongue-in-cheek refrains are popular from Karachi to Islamabad, whether its listeners are religious or speak Punjabi or not. [Link]

It’s a funny song, at least if you understand Punjabi, and it was stuck in my head all day. [Updated] The lyrics are quite interesting, and troubling in bits. Some of it calls for Musharraf to leave the Army and retire, but it’s hardly a liberal song. Not only is it pro-Islamicist and anti-American, it’s also anti-women in shorts and pro-Kashmiri separatist. That’s the problem with non-democratic countries, opposition movements often encompass a wide variety of different elements who might not otherwise have found common cause in an open society. The song picks up the sentiment on the street and brings together a variety of different anti-Musharraf feelings, all set to a catchy and easy to sing tune.

I’ve put the video below and the translated lyrics below the fold.

UPDATE: I was looking at the comments and reflecting on other examples of similar songs. The defining song for the North in the US Civil War was “John Brown’s Body” which later evolved into the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The US Civil Rights Struggle had We Shall Overcome. The anti-Apartheid struggle had Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, and there is a great movie about the use of song and dance in the struggle, called Amandla. The 2002 Kenyan elections had Unbwogable (listen here).

Can you guys suggest other great strongs of struggle? And if possible, can you give links to either the music or youtube clips? I’m sure there are lots of great songs I missed.

I never understood why the British referred to their home country as “old Blighty.” These days the term is mainly used with self-depricating irony, but during its heyday it was said in earnest, to refer to a homeland dearly missed:

Vilayated not blighted

The term was more common in the later days of the British Raj… It is … commonly used as a term of endearment by the expatriate British community, or those on holiday to refer to home… During World War I, “Dear Old Blighty” was a common sentimental reference, suggesting a longing for home by soldiers in the trenches. [Link]

What confused me about the term was that it implied that the motherland was a blight, which is an odd thing for homesick soldiers to admit. While I may have thought of the Raj as blighted, I didn’t think that the soldiers fighting for it did so, and I definitely didn’t think the term was sanctioned by the British authorities.

The confusion was soon cleared up by Wikipedia which tells me that the word “Blighty” has little to do with blight, it’s a false cognate. Instead, it is a desi loan word. Yes, All things come from India uncle strikes again - even the British term from home comes from the Hindustani word (borrowed from Arabic) for foreign:

Blighty is a British English slang term for Britain, deriving from the Hindustani word vilayati, meaning “foreign”, related to the Arabic word wilayat, meaning a kingdom or province.

According to World Wide Words, Sir Henry Yule and Arthur C Burnell explained in their Anglo-Indian dictionary, Hobson-Jobson, published in 1886, that the word came to be used, in British India, for several things the British had brought into the country, such as the tomato (bilayati baingan) and soda water, which was commonly called bilayati pani, or “foreign water”. [Link]

That’s right - instead of longing for a blighted homeland, these soldiers were longing for a foreign one. It’s as if they started to refer to themselves as “goray log,” appropriating an Indocentric term for other to refer to themselves. With so little discrimination, they’re just lucky they didn’t end up calling Mother England “Bhenjotistan”.

The horrible treatment South Asian workers receive in Arab nations has been receiving more and more press coverage of late. Hopefully, the spotlight will ensure that something changes for the better but until then, it’s our job to bring forward stories like this -

The imminent execution of a teenage maid in Saudi Arabia drew fierce criticism yesterday…According to the Saudi authorities, Rizana Nafeek admitted strangling the four-month-old boy while feeding him with a bottle.

But Nafeek, whose job was not meant to include child care, has denied making any such admission. She claims the child had begun to choke before losing consciousness in spite of her desperate efforts to clear his airway.

Tonight is the deadline for appeals in the case.

This criminal trial is especially ghastly on 2 counts —

Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International UK, said: “It is an absolute scandal that Saudi Arabia is preparing to behead a teenage girl who didn’t even have a lawyer at her trial. The Saudi authorities are flouting an international prohibition on the execution of child offenders by even imposing a death sentence on a defendant who was reportedly 17 at the time of the alleged crime.”

Prior SM coverage here and here and here.

A few months ago, Shashi Tharoor wrote an essay which contained a “casual observation” about how less and less women in India were wearing saris. Upon hearing about his thoughts, desi women all over the world gifted Shashi with a new orifice, via email, blog, essay, and voodoo doll. A few women, my curmudgeonly mother included, agreed with Tharoor’s lament; like him, they were saddened by the ascent of the Salwar Kameez.

[I do think that Malayalees who are my Mom’s/Shashi’s age are extra vexed by how the sartorial times, they are a-changin’, since they so strongly identify saris as part of the Mallu identity, but more on that later. Or not.]

Tharoor wrote a follow-up piece recently, which I discovered via the news tab. I’ve excerpted the yummier parts for your digestion.

On how graceful and pretty saris are:

For centuries, if not millennia, the alluring garment, all five or six or nine yards of it, has been the defining drape of Indian womanhood. Cotton or silk, Banarasi or Pochampalli, shimmering Kanjeevaram or multi-coloured bandhani, with the pallav draped front-to-back over the left shoulder or in the Gujarati style back-to-front over the right, the sari has stood the test of time, climate and body shape.

Of all the garments yet invented by man (or, not to be too sexist about it, mankind) the sari did most to flatter the wearer. Unlike every other female dress on the planet, the sari could be worn with elegance by women of any age, size or shape: you could never be too fat, too short or too ungainly to look good in a sari. Indeed, if you were stout, or bowlegged, or thick-waisted, nothing concealed those handicaps of nature better than the sari. Women looked good in a sari who could never have got away with appearing in public in a skirt.

Tharoor is less caustic and more rational than my elderly Aunts are, about how much the North is to blame:

So why has this masterpiece of feminine attire begun fading from our streets? On recent visits home to India I have begun to notice fewer and fewer saris in our public places, and practically none in the workplace. The salwar kameez, the trouser and even the Western dress-suit have begun to supplant it everywhere. And this is not just a northern phenomenon, the result of the increasing dominance of our culture by Punjabi-ised folk who think nothing of giving masculine names to their daughters.

At a recent Press conference I addressed in Trivandrum, there were perhaps a dozen women journalists present. Only one was wearing a sari: the rest, all Keralites without exception, were in salwar-kameezes. And when I was crass enough to ask why none of the “young ladies” present wore saris, the one who did modestly suggested that she was no longer very young.

Actually, it’s the youths! And the feminists!

Youth clearly has something to do with it; very few of today’s under-30 women seem to have the patience for draping a sari, and few of them seem to think it suitable for the speed with which they scurry through their lives. (“Try rushing to catch a bus in a sari,” one young lady pointedly remarked, “and you’ll switch to jeans the next day.”)

But there’s also something less utilitarian about their rejection of the sari for daily wear. Today’s younger generation of Indian women seem to associate the garment with an earlier era, a more traditional time when women did not compete on equal terms in a man’s world. Putting on pants, or a Western woman’s suit, or even desi leggings in the former of a salwar, strikes them as more modern.

Freeing their legs to move more briskly than the sari permits is, it seems, a form of liberation; it removes a self-imposed handicap, releasing the wearer from all the cultural assumptions associated with the traditional attire.

I’ve noticed this about brown people, too. We are the last ones to keep it old skool in our “costumes” (Blech. I hate that word. As if I’d wear Kanjeevaram on October 31. Meh.):

I think this is actually a great pity. One of the remarkable aspects of Indian modernity has always been its unwillingness to disown the past; from our nationalists and reformers onwards, we have always asserted that Indians can be modern in ancient garb. Political ideas derived from nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers have been articulated by men in mundus and dhotis that have not essentially changed since they were first worn two or three thousand years ago. (Statuary from the days of the Indus Valley Civilisation more than four thousand years ago show men draped in waistcloths that Mr Karunanidhi would still be happy to don.)

Gandhiji demonstrated that one did not have to put on a Western suit to challenge the British empire; when criticised by the British Press for calling upon the King in his simple loincloth, the Mahatma mildly observed, “His Majesty was wearing enough clothes for the two of us”. Where a Kemal Ataturk in Turkey banned his menfolk’s traditional fez as a symbol of backwardness and insisted that his compatriots don Western hats, India’s nationalist leaders not only retained their customary headgear, they added the defiantly desi “Gandhi cap” (oddly named, since Gandhiji himself never wore one). Our clothing has always been part of our sense of authenticity.

I REMEMBER being struck, on my first visit to Japan some fifteen years ago, by the ubiquitousness of Western clothing in that Asian country. Every Japanese man and woman in the street, on the subway or in the offices I visited wore suits and skirts and dresses; the kimono and its male equivalent were preserved at home, and brought out only for ceremonial occasions…

What will happen once the generation of women who grew up routinely wearing a sari every day dies out? The warning signs are all around us now. It would be sad indeed if, like the Japanese kimono, the sari becomes a rare and exotic garment in its own land, worn only to temples and weddings.

Find the rest of his essay here. Thoughts?

Time for something fluffier: Bipasha + Ronaldo? Maybe!

They were hosting the Seven Wonders of the World party in Lisbon together. And they got along so well:

Revealing the details, she said: “I felt like a princess. He gave me so many compliments. He danced with me throughout the night. There were 50,000 jealous women staring at us. I must’ve got so much Portuguese bud-dua (bad wishes) that night. The local girls wanted to murder me. Now he wants to e-mail me regularly.”

During dinner Cristiano told Bipasha that he was a big fan of Bollywood. “I thought he was just trying to be sweet. I told him he didn’t have to say he liked Bollywood films just to please me.

“Cristiano fished out his cell phone and made me hear Tujhse naraaz nahin from Masoom. He said, ‘Now do you believe me?’

Bipasha laughs about her interaction with the soccer star. “Though he looks older, Cristiano is very young, just a boy. Now I’ve told him, I’m only his fan on the field. Beyond the field he’s my friend. [HT]

He is young, just 22, and this detail apparently bothers many. How dare she! A younger man!

What does SHE have to say for herself?

Cristiano Ronaldo may not have been at a social distance when the photo being splashed on TV screens and the internet was clicked using a cell phone camera, but it isn’t a kiss that the photo shows, and definitely not a lip lock, says the livid bongshell.

“All the joy of that meeting with my favorite footballer has evaporated,” she laments.

“I don’t need to explain my behavior. I’m a free-spirited person. But I’m not footloose. It takes me a long time to become close to anyone. I’m certainly not some giddyheaded teenager who would get so carried away in Ronaldo’s company that I’d kiss him in public. My business manager Tanuja and dress designer Rocky S were present, would I be that dumb? There are far more discreet and private places to do such things. Even if I was single, I would not get carried away at my first meeting with a 22-year-old boy, no matter how big a celebrity he is, to misbehave with him in public.” [SAWF]

Pilgrims is the name commonly applied to early settlers of the Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts. Their leadership came from a religious congregation who had fled a volatile political environment in the East Midlands of England for the relative calm of Holland in the Netherlands. Concerned with losing their cultural identity, the group later arranged with English investors to establish a new colony in North America…Their story has become a central theme in United States cultural identity. [wiki]

This country was born because people desired the freedom to worship their God in their own way. To me, that is so American.

To have the freedom to be yourself, to be entitled to respect, to experience tolerance instead of persecution…these are the central themes with which I define my American identity.

What else is American? E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. One cultural identity, comprised of hundreds of influences, origins and traditions. If you take a step back and ponder it, America seems like a miraculous idea; you start to respect the safeguards put in place to protect people. One of the most significant? The separation between church and state. This is where things get complicated, but that’s not a bad thing. Everyone is complicated, why should we expect our nations not to be? Yes, there are religious words on money and everyone knows that there is a Judeo-Christian foundation to a lot of what is considered American…but there is also respect for other ideas. Or at least, there should be. At the very least, there should be the freedom for others to worship their God, in their own way, no matter what you or I think about it. There should be mutual respect. There should be.

A Hindu clergyman made history Thursday by offering the Senate’s morning prayer, but only after police officers removed three shouting protesters from the visitors’ gallery.

Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple in Reno, Nev., gave the brief prayer that opens each day’s Senate session. As he stood at the chamber’s podium in a bright orange and burgundy robe, two women and a man began shouting ”this is an abomination” and other complaints from the gallery.

Police officers quickly arrested them and charged them disrupting Congress, a misdemeanor. The male protester told an AP reporter, ”we are Christians and patriots” before police handcuffed them and led them away. [NYT]

No, you are Christians and fools. Way to make Team Jesus look awful, as you misrepresent everything that the man stood for and preached.

For several days, the Mississippi-based American Family Association has urged its members to object to the prayer because Zed would be ”seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god.” [NYT]

Yes, because the prayer he offered was SO offensive to actual Christians, agnostics or those who have been touched by a noodly appendage:

Zed, the first Hindu to offer the Senate prayer, began: ”We meditate on the transcendental glory of the Deity Supreme, who is inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky and inside the soul of the heaven. May He stimulate and illuminate our minds.”

As the Senate prepared for another day of debate over the Iraq war, Zed closed with, ”Peace, peace, peace be unto all.” [NYT]

Let me tell you something about what that Uncle said— it was far kinder and more welcoming than a lot of what I heard in Catholic school, especially if the Pope was involved. For shame. Perhaps the most offensive aspect of his spiritual offering was its emphasis on peace?

Zed, who was born in India, was invited by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Speaking in the chamber shortly after the prayer, Reid defended the choice and linked it to the war debate.

”If people have any misunderstanding about Indians and Hindus,” Reid said, ”all they have to do is think of Gandhi,” a man ”who gave his life for peace.”

”I think it speaks well of our country that someone representing the faith of about a billion people comes here and can speak in communication with our heavenly Father regarding peace,” said Reid, a Mormon and sharp critic of President Bush’s Iraq policies. [NYT]

As several of you pointed out via email, news tab and flaming arrow, THIS is the money quote:

Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the protest ”shows the intolerance of many religious right activists. They say they want more religion in the public square, but it’s clear they mean only their religion.” [NYT]

What these Jesus-freaks are forgetting is that Christ was a man of peace. He didn’t surround himself with the pious and faux-righteous; he called those people out, as he deliberately and controversially chose to befriend the lowest of the low, tax collectors, prostitutes and the like. Was there ever a better example of tolerance in the Christian faith?

As I bitterly read the articles about this troubling, hurtful incident, I am reminded of those who persecuted Jesus, for what they perceived as his “blasphemy”. Two thousand years later, some of his so-called followers have become so drunk off of hate and fundamentalism, they cannot see straight, they cannot grasp that if this were two millenia ago, Jesus would be the man in the orange robe and they, they would be the hypocrites who attacked him and then cheered at his suffering.

How do you solve a problem like Maria Musharraf? It’s so dang hard to figure out what we should (much less can ) do with him. Lets be clear, by nearly any measure, he sounds like a pretty awful leader. And yet, perhaps he’s a Stalin in our conflicted time — someone we’d otherwise hate but whom other, more pressing international circumstances force us to extend a bit more, uh, courtesy than we’d like. If his umpteen missteps have brought us to the verge of actively “regime changing” him (a great read, BTW!), then perhaps this latest diatribe from the Hitler of our time (no, not Bush, sheesh) wins Mushie back a few more points -

Not in the Musharraf Fan Club Either

I talk to you today on the occasion of the criminal aggression carried out by Musharraf, his army and his security organs - the Crusaders’ hunting dogs - against Lal Masjid in Islamabad, and on the occasion of the dirty, despicable crime committed by Pakistani military intelligence - at the orders of Musharraf - against Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi when it showed him on television in women’s dress.

This is a message of blinding clarity to the Muslims in Pakistan, the Pakistani Ulema, and indeed, the Ulema in the rest of the Islamic world, and this crime can only be washed away by repentance or blood. I call on the Ulema in Pakistan and tell them: this is what you are worth to Musharraf, and this is the treatment that awaits you in the prisons of Musharraf’s hunting dogs, and this is what you are worth to the Crusaders. Musharraf and his hunting dogs have rubbed your honor in the dirt in the service of the Crusaders and the Jews, and if you don’t retaliate for your honor, Musharraf won’t spare any of you, and won’t stop until he eradicates Islam from Pakistan. Lowly Musharraf, who has sold his honor and religion to the Crusaders and Jews, is arrogant with you in the extreme and regards you with the utmost contempt, and treats you like animals and dogs, and only is satisfied by portraying you in the lowliest and most despicable light.

This is an eloquent message [from Musharraf] to every scholar and every free and honorable person in Pakistan: that resisting Musharraf, confronting him and demanding that he adhere to Islam and refrain from worshiping the Crusaders and Jews will only get you the worst types of contempt, humiliation and degradation.

Of his litany of complaints, it’s almost comical that perp-walking Ghazi on TV in a dress ranks quite so highly. Perhaps there’s some insight here into the Honor/Shame dynamic commentators have noted in the shadowy corners of Arab society that breed Zawahiris…. Whatever the case, if the other guys think he’s out to destroy Islamism, then perhaps there’s another twist to this Gordian Knot. A tough problem to solve indeed.

Rollin’ down Venice with Squishee in hand

I haven’t done any hard-nosed-journalism-type posts on SM in a while. Saturday night, when I found myself driving down Venice Blvd. in Los Angeles, I knew it was time to change all that. Out of the corner of my eye, on the errrr…corner, I spotted a Kwik-E-Mart with a huge line running around the building. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to film an undercover exposé with such a large crowd present so I determined that I would come back at a later time. On Monday I did just that. I casually walked past the bouncer who was shorter than me. What I found inside was shocking. Absolutely shocking! Indians were running the store and making a ton of money selling Squishees, hot dogs, and donuts. There were three brown dudes working the register and a really tall guy of uncertain ethnic origin pouring Squishees. I am happy to bring this exclusive hidden camera footage to our valued readers:

this whole week has been heavy, can we have some light reading please? has there been any coverage on Ash and Shek? or has their marriage ended in hell? [link]

You are right, it has been a somber sort of week. Sometimes, it’s okay to marinate in that for a bit before we pick ourselves up off the floor and throw out that bottle of whiskey. ;)

Via an anonmyous tipster on the news tab, who wrote:

the finger picking ,the slide, this is a masterful bluesy rendition of an old pathos filled malayalam song

I’ve never heard anything like it (not that I’m conversant with either blues OR Mallu music).

The first blast went off at about 1830 local time (1300 GMT), during the rush hour. Correspondents spoke of scenes of pandemonium, with people jumping from trains and bodies flung onto tracks.

An eyewitness at Mahim told the BBC some of those who had jumped from the train were run over by another train coming in the opposite direction.

The force of the blasts ripped doors and windows off carriages, and scattered luggage. Clothes and shoes were strewn along the tracks. [BBC]

Pressure cookers with 2.5kg of RDX each were placed on trains plying on the western line of the suburban (“local”) train network, which forms the backbone of the city’s transport network…All the bombs had been placed in the first-class “general” compartments (some compartments are reserved for women, called “ladies” compartments) of several trains running from Churchgate, the city-centre end of the western railway line, to the western suburbs of the city. They exploded at or in the near vicinity of the suburban railway stations of Matunga Road, Mahim, Bandra, Khar Road, Jogeshwari, Bhayandar and Borivali. [wiki]

We covered it last year, here.

Today, Uberdesi asks why only certain victims of terrorism get memorialized. Reading their post reminded me of the horrible significance of this date and I thank them for the unintended nudge.

Many of you commented or left news tips about the plan to give flowers to USCIS director Emilio Gonzalez, as a form of peaceful protest against the ridiculously unfair green card debacle. Approximately two hundred bouquets were sent. WaPo covers Gandhigiri:

They did it because that’s what Gandhi would have done.

Yesterday, their bouquets of purple roses, pink lilies and yellow daisies, which cost about $40 each and which were sent from all over the country, piled up on the immigration office’s loading dock at 20 Massachusetts Ave. NW, addressed to Gonzalez and stacked in columns taller than people.

The agency forwarded them to soldiers recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

“We know the reason behind it and understand the symbolism. We donated them in the same spirit in which they were provided to us,” said an agency official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a lawsuit over the matter filed by an advocacy group.

Background, for any who missed it:

Green card applicants were given hope on June 12, when the State Department posted a bulletin offering H1B visa holders who had been stuck in a bureaucratic logjam an opportunity to take that last step needed to apply for permanent residency.

Thousands of engineers, doctors and other educated foreigners began a mad scramble to file their applications before the July 2 deadline.

Vacations were canceled, and lawyers were called in. Elderly parents in far-flung corners of the world stood in line for hours to get copies of birth certificates and immunization records.

Then, on the day of the deadline, the State Department retracted the bulletin. The USCIS, which processes the applications, said it had already met its 140,000-person annual quota for employee-sponsored applicants.

A few weeks back when Anna wrote about D.C.’s Subcontinental Drift, a series of spoken word and performing arts events featuring South Asians in the D.C. area, I mentioned in the comments that I was going to borrow (ok, steal) their idea and implement it down in good ‘ole Texas where there is also a growing arts community. Well now it’s on, just like that:

Houston has many South Asian artists, musicians, and other creative individuals who never seem to get the type of attention that their counterparts in New York, L.A., and D.C. receive. This summer it’s time to change all that. Join us on Thursday, July 19th from 8:30-11:00 p.m. at the new downtown venue “Bar Bollywood” (basement of the Butterfly High Lounge) for a FREE night of Spoken Word, Live Music, and Visual Arts. DJ Raj Swift will also be on hand to lay down the backbeat.

If you are an artist of any kind and want to perform (especially a spoken word, literary, or dance piece) or just want more information, then email abhi [at] sepiamutiny.com ASAP.

Although this event is meant to spotlight South Asian artists, ALL are welcome and encouraged to attend. Spread the word.

Finally, Roopa Vasan will be on hand to cheek swab people for the South Asian Bone Marrow Registry in hopes of finding a match to save her cousin Vinay’s life.

Bar Bollywood
902 Capitol Street
Houston, TX 77002

Please let anyone you know in or around Houston know about this if you think it would interest them. Hope to see you there.

A few days ago, I wrote a surprisingly controversial post about a baby girl who had been buried alive, in Andhra Pradesh. Stupid me, I thought everyone would find such news abhorrent. But, in a shocking and to some, sickening twist, it would seem that condemning infanticide is wrong because it is more important to engage in the worst sort of cultural relativism.

Disagreeing with a man’s choice to bury his newborn granddaughter alive would be Western and especially Feminist stupidity. Are you perplexed? Wondering what I am going on about? Ah, then enjoy the following amuse bouche of comments from a few lurkers and readers, which that post inspired:

Dont get carried away by sensationalism

Everyone has it bad in India. you’re the only one who choose to single out the plight of women and measure it by YOUR western standards. It MUST be measured by Indian standards, i.e. the plight of Indian men, children, grandpas, grandmas, the whole society. Everyone has it bad in India, not just little girls.

just don’t forget, we live in the West, lets not judge everything by Western standards…If they want to kill their girl babies because girls mean one less hand to till the soil (by hand, of course), that is their buisness.

Poor people will do anything to survive. As long as its their family, and not anyone else’s, no one has a right to interfere.

you, possessing such a craving for attention, would rather start a thread focused on a single baby, a TOTALLY isolated incident, just so you can feel better!

Yes, I felt much better after that depressing thread, especially after I naively attempted to offer a counterpoint to it while proving that feminism can be a desi concept, too. As one of you said via email, after wading through comment-sewage, “I can’t believe there is so much misogyny and so little outrage here.”

::

Isolated. I thought of all those apologist quotes when I read the story which MasterVK was alert enough to submit to our news tab earlier today, about another newborn baby girl, who was also found and rescued:

AHMEDABAD: Her feeble cries help almost drowned in the din of the heavy downpour near Kankaria lake on Monday. Until a fireman found the newborn baby shivering in the rain, abandoned mercilessly without a piece of clothing on her body!

The child’s cries had gone unheard for hours and she had turned pale, lying in the incessant rains, near Kankaria lake. The baby was found by a team of firemen led by Rajesh Goswami who heard the faint cries early in the morning when they embarked on duty to check the oxygen levels in the lake.

Instead of the fish, the firemen found the freshly delivered girl who was dumped from the womb straight into the lake to die. “The girl did not have any clothing on her and had turned completely white. We had become sceptical about her survival,” said Goswami.

Early this morning in Islamabad, the week-long stand-off at Lal Masjid between radical militants and Pakistani security forces worsened. Via The Times Online:

Heavy smoke drifted over the mosque complex yesterday, only a few miles from the presidential palace and the parliament building. Gunfire and explosions thundered across the city as the codenamed Operation Silence unfolded. At times it seemed as if the entire complex was being flattened.

About 70 militants and 12 soldiers died in the fighting. Among the dead was Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the firebrand cleric who led the rebels during the standoff with Pakistan’s security forces, and who declared he would rather die than surrender.

He assumed command after Maulana Abdul Aziz, his elder brother and chief prayer leader, was caught trying to escape and wearing a woman’s burka last week.

Ghazi, who hoped that his martyrdom would inspire a revolution, was found dead in the basement.

Parents of children who attended schools at the compound prayed for their safety before discovering…

Only 20 boys were rescued by security forces who launched the final assault on the mosque. Others…were still missing as the military cleared the sprawling compound by nightfall, engaging in gun battles with militants, room by room.

As for the girls, some of whom had stated they were ready to die for their cause, out of their own free will:

About two dozen women and girls dressed in burkas fled from the mosque as the the final assault began. Among them was Umme Hasan, the wife of Maulana Abdul Aziz. The head of the Madrassa Hafza, the seminary for women, she was known for her extreme views and claimed to have trained her students to become suicide bombers.

Mushie, in a no-win situation: either he angers moderates or radicals, there’s no in between.

President Musharraf ordered his troops to enter the mosque after an emergency meeting yesterday and a final attempt to resolve the week-long stand-off failed. Hundreds of special forces stormed the mosque at dawn but did not dislodge the well-entrenched militants until well into the night.

Pakistani officials said that they had done everything to avoid a bloodbath that would have brought worldwide condemnation of General Musharraf’s embattled administration.

Whither Pakistan?

Political analysts believe that a confrontation between the Government and Islamists is now unavoidable. “It is a defining moment for both the country and the nation in the battle against militancy and religious extremism,” said Shireen Mazari, the chairwoman of the Institute for Strategic Studies, based in Islamabad. “There is no going back.”

NPR: Soldiers Storm Mosque in Pakistan, Killing Dozens

NYT [Thanks, Kush]: At Least 40 Militants Dead as Pakistani Military Storms Mosque After Talks Fail

I’ve been AWOL for a while due to work and personal reasons, but I wanted to very quickly let you know that Manish will be on CNN at 8:25 PM EST tonight, talking about the 7/11 promotion that requires 7/11 workers in 11 stores to dress up as Apu to help promote the Simpsons movie. We should be blogging this shortly, but for now, here are some links to his coverage of the event: Reminder: CNN tonight, Watch CNN Tuesday night, Meanwhile, over at Racialicious…, Racial Caricature Mart , Step’n Dispense It (updated again) , ‘The Simpsons’ go Bollywood (updated)

Ultrabrown posted some picts from last weekend’s cheek swab fest in NYC. Vinay Chakravarty and his wife showed up and, as Manish points out, it’s almost weird how much revelry the event managed to create…

Additional events are happening all over the country to help Vinay, Sameer and countless others in the future.

In particular, this weekend, Bay Area volunteers are hosting their MEGA DRIVE spanning over a dozen sites.

So here’s a little game to liven things up & help get the word out — snap a pict or 2 of you and your friends getting your cheeks swabbed and/or holding up your donor cards, send ‘em to ME (vinod@vinod.com), and, in the spirit of the Desi Dad project, we’ll post some of our fav mug shots on SM and Ultrabrown alongside these folks -

An anonymous tipster alerted us via the News tab to a possible racist/scandalous/nebulous slip of Michael Moore’s tongue. I sat through the entire, excruciating 10+ minute video at Breitbart.tv, only to discover that the controversial part is at the end; the video I posted below features the last eleven seconds of the entire segment and contains the relevant moment.

Link: sevenload.com

Well? What do you think? Racist or immature? Mispronounced or intentionally mangled? Or is this much ado about nothing? Comments on Breitbart were hot, heated and divided about whether or not Michael Moore started to channel Apu. What say you?

The FBI is apparently being proactive in doing its job by laying out specific scenarios on its website that employers can learn from in order to prevent spying and generally help keep our nation safe (via Wired). Here is one fearful scenario:

You hire a foreign-born engineer who has been educated in this country. Over a 10-15 year period, she rises to mid-level management. Then, she returns to her home country—where she gets paid by that government to set up a business that competes with yours.

The key there is “foreign-born.” It doesn’t matter if you have been educated in this country from an early age or even if you are a Greencard holder. If you are foreign-born then employers should watch out for you because you may sell good Americans out to your Motherland. That’s scary. If I was an employer I might instead hire someone that looks American…just to be safe. Here is another one:

A series of university students and professors from overseas take jobs in research labs on campus and get involved in related military projects. Individually, they learn only bits and pieces. But collectively, when they pass that information back to their home country, it paints a telling picture of our country’s defense initiatives.

Good advice. The next time I see a group of “FOBs” eating lunch together I am going to consider them a “collective.” But wait, what if someone thinks that I’m foreign born when they see me sitting with a group of other desis at school! Qué Malo!

The FBI is willing to help by offering a training program (or something) to spot these collectives, or sleeper cells, or whatever…

Specifically: Join our Counterintelligence Domain Program or our Research and Technology Protection program.

Amazing what helpful advice you find on websites paid for by your tax dollars. I hope no foreign born readers visit Sepia Mutiny. Individually they can’t do us any harm but collectively they could use the knowledge they gain here to paint a telling picture of how we operate and then make the blogs of their own countries better.

I’m so passionate about telling you to get out to popped-collar-ville tomorrow evening, for the next marrow donor drive in DC, I decided to split my original “Best and Worst of Our Community” post in two, because I didn’t want the details for such an important event to be hidden under “the fold”.

If you are in DC and you have not registered yet— please come by because time is precious. I learned this weekend that if you register online or at your local center, it takes weeks to process your swabs; if you come to one of Vinay’s drives, they overnight everything to the database under his name and processing is expedited. Please, please, please register to be a committed donor.

TiE Seattle disappointed me, but I’d rather focus on the best of what our community can do, because the one thing I’m trying to learn from Vinay is relentless positivity.

First off, a huge thank you to mutineer Seema, who registered people at TANA this weekend until her feet ached. A few of our readers pitched in to help flyer, explain and swab— and I got to witness it.

I’ve never been happier to be a part of this sepia-colored space. Part of my sadness over my “second post” was inspired by what I saw at TANA— people were going without food, standing for hours, bravely facing rejection and apathy…and they did it with a smile on their face and faith in their hearts that it is just a matter of time before we find the one. With such memories playing on my internal plasma, how can I NOT cringe at those who would decline to do far less than what I saw all of you do. Together, you made sure a few hundred more people were added to the database and that deserves to be applauded.

Not all of us are Telugu, so I know plenty of you chocolate city citizens didn’t get to come on down and get swabbed— have no fear, happy hour is here! I heard about the following event at Subcontinental Drift, but have been too busy to post it before. I’m sorry about that because it’s going to be good fun for a great cause:

Join us for a Happy Hour and Show your Support!

Register as a Bone Marrow Donor!

Tuesday, July 10th, 5:30 - 9 pm

Tony & Joe’s Seafood Restaurant (Upstairs Lounge) at Georgetown Washington Harbor

3000 K Street Northwest Washington, DC, 20007

RSVP encouraged: dcdonordrive@aol.com

Drink specials if you register as a donor!!

Already registered? Come to show your support! Everyone welcome!

$7 suggested charitable donation to marrow donor recruitment.

Ultrabrown said (with a twinge of guilt) that the NYC mega-event which was held yesterday was SO MUCH FUN. I am certain that gazing at the Kennedy Center while the sun sets, as we toast to life, love and the pursuit of donors won’t be too shabby, either. I’ll be there. Will you? :)

I was getting ready to post a friendly, pushy reminder about a fantastic event which is taking place tomorrow, in DC at Tony and Joe’s (read: Sequoia ;)— but when I went to Vinay’s excellent website, something else caught my attention.

Something wrong.

All of us have at some point or another, met self righteous folk, very often rich entrepreneurs, who act like they’re God’s gift to the rest of us. Here’s where they become even more obnoxious if you can imagine what that might look like. TiE Seattle approached me last year to do a story on them for a prominent CA Indian paper which I promptly did. I didn’t play any games with them, didn’t dangle them for weeks. They asked, said their story had not been told before, I promptly, gladly did a story on them. Period.

Afterward, at every single TiE event I went to, their president (who shares his name with a Bollywood superstar) would drop as I’d be right in the middle of dinner, and demand right away, “So when are you doing another story on us?” At first I thought he was making small talk, then I thought he was just some overeager zealot but then I heard from many people that his malaise was something else. He just suffered from a bad case of pushy Swagger, EGO and a of lack of good manners. So I did what every journalist does. Ignored his prattle and stopped going to TiE Seattle…

I approached TiE asking them if they’d be kind enough to circulate an email to their member base telling them about Vinay and the bone marrow drive for him in Seattle. Just an email. I didn’t ask them for money or anything else. Just an email. 15 days out and what do I get? Zilch. Not even the courtesy of a, “Right now we’re too busy counting our dollars and won’t be able to email our members. Thank you for asking.”

Is it too much to ask to help a dying man? [SeattlePI]

Can I buy a round of WTFs, straight up? I’ve been called some…interesting things on SM these past few days, but maybe one of the trolls should have hurled “naive” my way. How could anyone say no to this cause? I can understand why the blogger, Priyanka Joshi, whom I quoted above, said this:

Corp-Social Responsibility? Hahaha![SeattlePI]

Would it have been THAT difficult to forward Priyanka’s email to their members? Maybe there are good souls in the Seattle chapter who would’ve wanted to help Vinay. It’s a shame that certain people are too…I don’t know what to put here…to help another human being.

Disclaimer for those who need it:

I am not denigrating TiE, its chapters or even its Seattle members. I’m just echoing another bloggers shock and disappointment in whomever decided that a wee email wasn’t important enough to pass on…okay?

I mean, it’s not like I sent the following words heavenwards…

So, in spirit of human dignity, as I pray for Vinay tonight, I’m also saying a prayer for TiE Seattle. “May TiE’s swagger and a lack of concern for other people be replaced by genuine compassion for the rich and the middle class alike.” Amen. [SeattlePI]

…but that’s only because I didn’t think of them, first. Amen.

I’m a big fan of Bryan Caplan & Arnold Kling over at EconLog and in particular thought mutineers would be interested in this blogpost. Caplan analyzes a paper from Rafael Di Tella (HBS) and Robert MacCulloch (Princeton) which models the relationship between a country’s perceived level of corruption and its political orientation -

We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that governments in poor countries have a more left wing rhetoric than those in OECD countries…The empirical pattern of beliefs within countries is consistent with this explanation: people who perceive corruption to be high in the country are also more likely to lean left ideologically and to declare to support a more intrusive government in economic matters.

Put simply, more perception of corruption = more likely to be an economic lefty. Bryan brings up the all-too-obvious consequential impact — increasing the role of govt in the economy, particulary in the midst of corruption, should increase the level of corruption overall. Caplan quotes Anne Kreuger who coined the term Rent Seeking back in 1973 -

If the market mechanism is suspect, the inevitable temptation is to resort to greater and greater intervention, thereby increasing the amount of economic activity devoted to rent seeking. As such, a political “vicious circle” may develop. People perceive that the market mechanism does not function in a way compatible with socially approved goals because of competitive rent seeking. A political consensus therefore emerges to intervene further in the market, rent seeking increases, and further intervention results.

Di Tella and MacCulloch duly note, however, that the Indian electorate seems far more intelligent about this issue and presents a very interesting exception to their general observation -

When the analysis is carried out at the individual country level an interesting exception occurs: India. In this country there is a positive and significant correlation between the perception of corruption and placing one’s views on the right end of the political spectrum, not the left.

Perhaps it’s because Desi’s have been uniquely well acquainted with the combination of

• 40 years of empty, albeit well intentioned rhetoric
• widely lauded business acumen

The Founding Fathers were quite prescient that the lack of angels amongst men both created and limited the scope of government; unfortunately, for the rest of the 3rd world, it seems, the population is rather swayed by appeals to use government power to bring about Cosmic Justice…

Exactly 32.5 years ago, a short man with a fearsome moustache stood at a nursery window, tears in his eyes, pride bordering on arrogance spilling forth via his words.

“See her? The one with the huge eyes? That’s my daughter.”

The strangers standing near him congratulated him and politely made remarks about his newborn’s full head of hair and yes, her eyes, which were peering around suspiciously as if she were casing her bassinet, planning a possible escape.

“She was alert, when she was born. She didn’t cry. She…uh…she takes after me. Strong.”

He cleared his throat and complained about the dust, using his ever-present handkerchief to wipe his eyes swiftly.

“Look at the other babies…they are oblivious. They’re nothing compared to her.” He had never been so smug.

My “Grandma”, who is a Russian Orthodox woman who married an Italian, who still sends me a check every January, who told me this story, stood by him, smiling.

“Oh, cut the bullshit George! Every parent thinks their kid is a damned miracle.”

She was teasing him, she didn’t mean it. She always admitted as much when telling this tale, because the next part of it involves her elbowing the woman next to her, and asking, “Have you ever seen a baby with so much hair and such big eyes? Most kids are bald. And squinty.”

My Mom was down the hall, passed out. There was still a tiny smudge of flour on her arm; she had been making chapati when I made my abrupt entrance on a Saturday night, after less than two hours of labor.

::

Much like the adorable protagonist of “Knocked Up”, my father had purchased baby books to study.

Ever the engineer, he charted out milestones and other information. He laid awake at night, unable to sleep; his brain, which already over thought everything, was now whirring even faster. He was the precursor to today’s “helicopter” parent, though he’d scoff at such dilettantes for being OCD-freaks-come-lately.

“That’s what happens when you wait until you are 38 to have a child. You really parent”, he’d explain to me and anyone else who would listen, later.

::

“You will be a book baby,” he allegedly announced to me, the day he strapped me in to the back of one massive Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, on the way home from the hospital. “You will do everything exactly when the books say…”

…or else. Or else, what? Who knows, I’m just lucky I did it. All that amazing early achievement would buy me some leeway when I turned out to be spectacularly mediocre, later on in life.

Ah, I love being from Kerala. Now I can claim genetics as the reason for my refusing to shop at Wal-mart. Ha!

The Communist government of Kerala is threatening to ban “retail giants” from setting up shop in the Indian state. The measure, which appears to be backed by all the major political parties in Kerala, is chiefly aimed at India’s version of Wal-Mart, Reliance Industries. The concern is that a proliferation of large retail outlets would drive tens of thousands of mom-and-pop shop operators out of business. [Salon.com]

Hmmmm. That last sentence explains why I prefer Olsson’s > Borders, too.

Kerala made headlines not so long ago for attempting to ban Coca-Cola; the state has a long history of pursuing its own unique path to development. Naturally, the more gung-ho-for-capitalism elements of Indian society aren’t mincing their deprecating words: An editorial in the Indian Express made no attempt to restrain its sarcasm:

Coke poisons people. Highway tolls exploit them. Fiscal discipline starves projects that can better their lives. So, of course, big retail chains, as Kerala’s Left explained to this newspaper on Monday, are anti-people … Food minister … C. Divakaran is ever so bold in proposing to ban a business activity permitted almost everywhere bar places like North Korea. [Salon.com]

Yo, I totally feel exploited by highway tolls. It’s the only thing I don’t miss about driving to NYC. Anyway, I think it is a bold move, and an interesting one at that. Salon’s Andrew Leonard raises a sobering point:

Let’s switch venues. The safety of Chinese-made products is in the news again today, as China’s government announced that a whopping one-fifth of the products on the shelves of Chinese stores were found to be substandard or tainted. The immediate, and understandable impulse, is to blame the health hazards of Chinese products on the lack of regulatory enforcement in China, a state of affairs exacerbated by state corruption, a weak judiciary, and a general absence of effective checks and balances in Chinese society. But that’s only one-half of the picture. The other half is the imperative, in the biggest markets for Chinese exports, that demands ever-lower prices for everything.

In “The Wal-Mart Effect,” Charles Fishman makes a compelling argument that Wal-Mart’s market power inevitably forces its suppliers to cut corners on quality in order to deliver the lower and lower prices that Wal-Mart demands. So those suppliers close their American manufacturing facilities and start sourcing their products in China — if they don’t, they’ll lose their place on Wal-Mart’s shelves. [Salon.com]

Mein Gott, I’m starting to feel like a very pink democrat…

But the symbolism of Kerala’s “bold” move, however quixotic, is still potent. Markets left to themselves do not deliver perfect outcomes. Sometimes government has to push back.

Indeed, especially since those sell-outs in Bengal don’t have the stones to do so. ;)

Interestingly, in the other Left-ruled state of West Bengal, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattcharjee has rolled out the red carpet to Mukesh Ambani’s ambitious retail initiative, though coalition partners have expressed their reservations on the issue. [CNN-IBN]

Compare that reaction to THIS thenga-flavored one:

“The public mood is against Reliance, so we will stop them in their tracks,” Food and Civil Supplies Minister, C Divakaran said. [CNN-IBN]

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about what I feel has been chronic mistreatment of H-1B workers by the immigration system. This week, yet another chapter in the American Immigration Bizarro-land story has unfolded, as thousands of legal workers, following an official State Department advisory, prepared to file Green Card applications, only to be told, in some cases after they had already filed, that the USCIS would not be accepting any applications at all.

The Times explains the complicated chain of events as follows:

The episode started on June 12, when the State Department announced in a monthly bulletin that green cards would be available starting July 2 for applicants across the range of high-skilled categories. That was a signal to immigrants who have been working in this country on temporary visas that they would be able to apply to become permanent residents.

Thousands of immigrants rushed to obtain certified documents, assemble employer sponsorship papers, take medical examinations and dispatch their applications. Many canceled travel plans so they could be in the United States when their applications arrived on July 2, as the law required.

But on Monday, the State Department announced that no more green cards were available. Snared in the turnabout were well-educated, highly skilled, legal immigrants, many of them doctors and medical technicians, with long work experience in this country. All had obtained federal certification that no American workers were available for the jobs they hold. (link)

There’s more to it — the goal here was to reduce the extensive USCIS backlogs — but the reversal means the backlogs are reinstated. Now potential applicants may have to wait as many as four or five years to apply again, leaving many people in limbo. (The Times has a good interview with an Indian doctor in Illinois, who is deeply distraught about this.) As I’ve said before, the cost of an extremely slow and unpredictable immigration system comes in people’s lives: waiting 5-10 years for a Green Card without being certain of success is dispiriting at best, and soul-crushing at worst.

Incidentally, there is also an illuminating breakdown of this bizarre episode at Murthy.com. And our blog-friend Arzan Wadia had a post on this this past Monday, where he made his feelings known.

Are you one of the people who applied for a Green Card this past Monday? You may want to get in contact with a Lawyers’ Group called American Immigration Lawyers Federation (AILF). They are planning a class-action lawsuit against the USCIS over its sudden reversal, and will probably be looking for plaintiffs who meet a certain profile to join the case (see this PDF FAQ).

Many of you have offered your good wishes for Vinay’s health— some of you have even taken the next step and become part of the database. Others— especially when they read these posts I keep beating you about the head (and hopefully heart) with— are reminded of their intention to get registered; they think, oh, I’ll make it to the next drive and do it then.

A very special opportunity to get swabbed is available to desis in what I still think of as the brownest city of them all— even if it’s a big apple and not a mango. This Sunday, in NYC, from 4-8 pm, show up at Pianos and not only will you increase the possibility of saving someone’s life, you may get to meet the man who has inspired this incredible campaign to paint the national database sepia. Vinay might be there. :) Please wish him a happy second wedding anniversary (July 3) for me, if you go.

If you can’t attend or you are not in the NYC area, please harass your loved ones. Get every South Asian person you know to consider becoming a committed donor; a list of the drives which are happening all over the country is here. While my constant posting about Vinay may insinuate otherwise, this is about all of us, not one of us. It’s scary to consider how close this can hit to home; I’ve lost two family members in three years to this disease. I may not know Vinay, but I don’t have to, to believe in what he and his team are going to do.

::

Which diseases can be treated by marrow transplant?

Over 70 diseases including the leukemia’s, aplastic anemia, severe combined immune deficiency, sickle cell anemia and radiation poisoning are treated by marrow transplant.

::

What exactly is a marrow / stem cell transplant?

Simply, it is the replacement of diseased blood stem cells from a health donor infused into a patient’s vein just like a blood transfusion. Within four to six weeks the transplanted marrow / stem cells begin to produce normal blood cells in the patient.

::

Who can become a marrow / stem cell donor?

You must be between 18 and 60 years old, have no history of hepatitis, heart disease, cancer or AIDS, and sign a consent form allowing the Registry to include your HLA tissue type in its confidential files for future matching. See NMDP link below for more details: Donor information (NMDP) and Donor Eligibility Guidelines.

::

How do I know if I am a match?

If you are found to be a possible match with a patient, the center in which you tested and/or the NMDP will contact you immediately and give you the option of proceeding to the next level/s of testing to insure final HLA compatibility with the patient.

::

Who pays for these tests?

Not you - the patient or his/her medical insurance does.

I’m swamped at work, but I’m also outraged, because of Fuerza Dulce’s latest submission to our news tab— I can’t let this go. CNN may be a bunch of assholes with sensationalism on their minds, but their story and this one are essentially about the same thing; we do not value the lives of women. Via the BBC:

A two-day-old baby girl in India has survived after being buried alive in a field by her maternal grandfather in the south of the country. The baby, who had apparently never been fed, was discovered by a farmer near a village some 150km south of Hyderabad.

He said he only spotted her because her tiny hand was sticking out of the soil.

Police say they have arrested the baby’s grandfather, 52-year-old Abdul Rahman, after he confessed to trying to kill the newborn by burying her alive.

“I am yet to marry off four daughters and cannot take responsibility for a fifth one, even when she is only a granddaughter,” Mr Rahman was quoted as telling police.

The article went on to state that he may have taken his grandchild without his dauther’s consent. His unnamed grandchild. Whom he buried. Alive.

I am so livid, I can barely type. Because of this immutable fact, I will warn you that I will shut this thread down if:

• If “Maximum City” gets mentioned. I beg you, this is not the place.
• I get asked, “why didn’t you post about immigration/terrorism/the story I sent in four times, instead of this predictable infanticide story?”
• If one of you says this makes us look bad.

I really don’t care if all of the above makes me a pain in your ass or if it proves that the trolls are right and I am a bitch, after all. This doesn’t make us look bad, this IS bad.

A baby. Buried alive. Yes, it’s happened for centuries, but that doesn’t mean that reading such a story five minutes ago didn’t send a searing dagger in to my heart. We each blog about whatever moves us; there are no assignments in the bunker, no requirements or expectations. This moved me to despair. There will never be a point when we bless someone by saying, “May you be the mother of a hundred daughters”, and we are lesser for it.

For my money, the U.S. media’s coverage of South Asia has improved a lot in recent years. I often hear complaints about the New York Times’ Somini Sengupta (and on occasion I’ve had my criticisms too), but overall the quality of South Asia coverage at the Times has been consistently high in my estimation.

Periodically, however, major American media sources seem to lose their focus a little. First up, witness today’s article on Widows at Cnn.com. How is this a “fresh” story? Why is it the lede at CNN, exactly? (For several hours on Thursday afternoon, this was the leading story on Cnn.com’s website.) While Indian widows face real problems — and we’ve talked about them at SM before — the superficial style of coverage in this particular CNN story smacks of sensationalism. There is so much happening in the world — the siege of the Red Mosque in Pakistan, and the derailment of the commuter train in London might be two examples. I’m not sure why or how this is judged “leading news.”

And then there’s the unusual New York Times story about the woman in Karnataka who’s started a blog to raise awareness of her husband’s whistle-blowing activities. By getting public attention she’s trying to avoid having his fate resemble that of other government workers engaged in fighting corruption in the past few years — two of whom were assasinated.

I do wish M. N. Vijayakumar and J. N. Jayashree well, and there is something rather smart about this approach: the best way to fight lack of information transparency is to aim for hyper-transparency (“wiki-giri”, perhaps). But a visit to the “Fighting Corruption” blog is a little less than inspiring; from my attempted navigation, it was actually a bit difficult to pin down the specific cases where Vijayakumar has attempted to make interventions. And my bigger concern is the danger that this strategy might only work in exceptional instances. It’s fine if 1 or 5 or 10 whistle-blowers are keeping blogs; people will pay attention. But what about 1000, or 10,000? Since a single blog can hardly clean up corruption single-handedly, to me this story falls under “novelty,” not so much “news.” What’s your view?

Meanwhile, that Sunkrish Bala is a slice of adorable, isn’t he? I wouldn’t kick him…off the couch…where we would be demurely seated on opposite sides. And not touching. With vada on the coffee table as our witness. And our parents there, too. Ah, I digress.

But while I’m digressing, you should know that “Notes from the Underbelly”, which SB starred on, was one of my favorite shows of the past season. :) Go on with your bad self, Sunkrish, whose name leaves me puzzled. And let me just say that I heart you more, for trying to help Vinay and others like him. “I’m registered…are you?” should become our new pickup line at the clubs, because I would’ve hurled my digits at THAT, for sure.

I was proud to see several of you get swabbed at the last Subcontinental Drift event. Drives are still happening all over the country.

There is still time— one of you could be the one.

A little over a month ago, I wrote a post about a Muslim youth who had cut the hair of a Sikh peer, during a fight in their high school bathroom. You may recall it— I asked you if this was a hate crime and many of you responded, some by saying “yes”, others “no”. The utility of hate crimes legislation was also debated; weren’t all violations worthy of condemnation? What if penalizing hate crimes really meant prosecuting thought crimes?

I thought of all of this, today. I was moderating a link on our news tab by clicking it, to make sure it worked. This takes less than a second, but sometimes, I linger for an extra moment on whatever news site you’ve submitted, especially if there’s another story which captures my attention (I’m powerless against the “most emailed” list).

“Survivor of Hate Crime Takes Own Life”, it said. Or something similar. I realized that David Ritcheson, 18, was dead, a year after he probably should have been. A comment from the post I referenced above came back to me:

I wouldn’t classify this as a crime… a little hair cut doesn’t hurt. He wasn’t sodomized for crying out loud. Plus, these were kids. Kids can be more sadistic than adults at times. Its actually somewhat normal for a pre-teen to be sadistic… part of the maturation process. This was peer pressure, not a hate crime. Whoever cut the Sikh fellow’s hair did to retain his status among the peer group. [Link]

Well, David was sodomized, for crying out loud. He wasn’t just sexually assaulted, he was brutalized. Stomped. Burned. Kicked. And as he lay on the ground, naked and dying, his attackers poured bleach on him. Why? He tried to kiss a 12-year old white girl, who was not related to either of his murderers.

Who was David?

David Ritcheson had been a running back on the Klein Collins High School football team. He was homecoming prince as a freshman and had a girlfriend. He “hung out with the good crowd,” he says, and had every reason to look forward to returning last fall.

But once classes resumed, Ritcheson was overwhelmed by the looks he got everywhere he went — in the halls, in the cafeteria, in classrooms.

The looks all said the same thing: You’re a victim, how do you deal with it? Everybody knew what had happened to him, and the attack, he says, “was just so degrading.”

In a case that drew national attention, Ritcheson, a Mexican-American, was severely assaulted last April 23 by two youths while partying in Spring. One of the attackers, a skinhead named David Tuck, yelled ethnic slurs and kicked a pipe up his rectum, severely damaging his internal organs and leaving Ritcheson in the hospital for three months and eight days — almost all of it in critical care. [Houston Chronicle]

Here are his own words, which were uttered at a hearing on H.R. 1592, The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007; he testified, in an effort to wrest some good from his pain.

I appear before you as a survivor of one of the most despicable, shocking, and heinous acts of hate violence this country has seen in decades. Nearly one year ago on April 22, 2006, I was viciously attacked by two individuals because of my heritage as a Mexican-American…a minor disagreement between me and the attackers turned into the pretext for what I believe was a premeditated hate crime. This was a moment that would change my life forever. After I was surprisingly sucker punched and knocked out, I was dragged into the back yard for an attack that would last for over an hour. Two individuals, one an admitted racist skinhead, attempted to carve a swastika on my chest. Today I still bear that scar on my chest like a scarlet letter. After they stripped me naked, I was burned with cigarettes and savagely kicked by this skinhead’s steel toed army boots. After burning me in the center of the forehead, the skinhead attacker was heard saying that now I looked like an Indian with the red dot on my forehead.

Back in SM’s youth, we brought you the story of Indian Superman (posted in 2004! We was the OG playas on the Desi Blogging scene yo).

It takes a lot of brylcreem to get that curly lock just so…

[Indian Superman] is one of those rare movies that manages to offend on every level. It is badly acted, badly directed, badly filmed, and makes no sense whatsoever. And just to add that extra level of offensiveness, the whole project is probably illegal.

Why Illegal? Well, here’s the most direct / literal reason -

The movie starts with thundering music playing over the sight of a cityscape from some advanced alien civilization - hey, wait a minute! That music is from the American Superman movie! So are those special effects shots!

Ah, the beauty of cut & paste

‘04 was the pre-YouTube Internet and, at the time, we weren’t able to post any clips of the flick. Luckily, the world has evolved and clips are now far easier to find (here’s one, presumably from the film’s climactic ending where Superman saves an otherwise-doomed Indian Airlines flight).

Of new interest to long time mutineers, however, it appears that Puneet Issar and Dharmendra Deol have passed the Superman baton on to a host of desi sequels…

Pimp My Desi Ride

…describe the most famous car strutting along India’s roads today, think of some of the qualities associated with hot automotive design….Sleek. Sporty. Sexy. Fast.

Now throw them out….None of those words applies to the Ambassador.

And in the Amby, we find a microcosm of Indian economic history -

TRACE the car’s journey through the last half-century and you can chart the rise of India’s post-colonial ruling class, its flirtation with socialism and its recent economic boom that has the world abuzz.

…As I journeyed all over India,” wrote Singh, who died in 1999, “I came to understand that if one thing can be singled out to stand for the past 50 years of India and its closed economy, now open and moving into the new millennium, it has to be the Ambassador.”

As they say, sometimes a dog’s so ugly, it’s actually cute and perhaps when a car is & remains this backwards, it’s easy to wax nostalgic. Whatever the case, the humble Ambassador turns 50 this year and given the transience of modern life, it’s hard not to take notice…

You can’t be desi and have spent anytime in da homeland without being able to relate to stories like this - “…police in north India once stopped an Ambassador with 27 people on board”

Sometimes, breaking news is so significant, it demands that I waste my lunchtime on it. This is not that kind of news story (thanks, Anon + Rose). Via Yahoo!:

British author Salman Rushdie and his wife Padma Lakshmi, host of TV show “Top Chef,” are getting divorced, his spokeswoman said on Monday, just two weeks after he was awarded a controversial knighthood.

Fourth time? Not a charm, it turns out.

He married Lakshmi, a former model born in 1970 in India, in 2004. She was his fourth wife and the couple had no children.

It’s not him, it’s her:

“Salman Rushdie has agreed to divorce his wife, Padma Lakshmi, because of her desire to end their marriage,” spokeswoman Jin Auh said in a statement on his behalf.

I don’t think it was just the British, who did:

When the Indian-born Rushdie started his romance with the model more than 20 years his junior, the British tabloids made much of their differences in age and intellectual stature.

But Rushdie always defended his wife.

Am I the only one who finds “not supposed to be permitted to be” awkward?

“Anyone who’s met Padma knows she’s as intelligent as they come,” he told The Times of London in a 2005 interview. “But, you know, it’s not supposed to be permitted to be gorgeous and really smart and also very nice.”

Okay, snark aside, I do remember feeling a bit sorry for him. Or at least wincing on his behalf. Once.

“It feels very odd to see newspaper articles saying ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Why Do Beautiful Women Love Ugly Men?”’ he said in the interview. “But at this stage, I’m kind of resigned to it at — as you say — pushing 60.”

While a few of you howled that these two were your top pick for the “One of these things is not like the other/THEY FREAKING DON’T BELONG TOGETHER”-prize, I still say that TomKat deserves THAT dishonor. Yes, more than AbhiShwarya, even. Back to reading Maximum City, if you’re not industriously doing something else. ;)

A friend of mine from here in Texas recently handed me a copy of the Gujarat guidebook she’s edited and published after living there for some time (and with the additional help of some paid local writers). Since my family is originally from Gujarat I’ve never even considered the need for getting my hands on a guidebook before each visit there. After skimming through nearly 400 pages rich in history and photography I think I’ll be taking this along on my next trip to the motherland. Think “Lonely Planet on steroids”:

A grill would have totally completed this cover picture.

Five thousand years of civilization

Savor the history and romance, colors and textures, rhythms and dance of a land where time have never stood still.

From the rocky heights of the Sahyadri Mountains across to the salt flats of the Desert of Kachchh, Gujarat has something for everyone. Wander through remains of ancient Indus Valley civilizations; venture to meet the lions of Gir Forest; soak in the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi; dance on the streets for nine nights of Navratri. Enjoy an unparalleled ethos of hospitality. Experience vibrant crafts, exquisite architecture, rich wildlife reserves, colorful festivals and eclectic traditions. Join five millennia of seafarers, merchants and settlers from around the globe and come explore Gujarat. [Link]

What the hell. Gujarat has lions? I wonder why my dad has failed to ever mention this salient fact to me (but I’m sure he’ll comment on it and give me an earful down below). I remember going all the way to the northern part of India on a tiger safari but had no idea that there were lions right there in Gujarat. I think part of the problem is that to me Gujarat is just Ahmedabad, and if someone asks me what you do there I’d say “ummmmm…CG Road, Gandhi Ashram, and Siddi Sayid.” I love eating Amul cheese sandwiches when I am in India but I didn’t know I could take a tour of the Amul plant and watch it get made. It’s probably similar to going wine tasting in Napa (but cheese sandwiches are better than wine). The guidebook also taught me a little about the village (Sarkhej) that my grandparents lived in and where my parents partially grew up. I’ve been there but either didn’t know, or couldn’t remember, the significance of the place until I read here about the complex that the village was built around:

Sarkhej Roaza is a mosque, tomb, and royal complex dedicated to the memory of Salikh Ahmed Khattu Ganj Baksh, the spiritual advisor of Ahmed Shah…The Roza was a retreat for successive rulers, each adding a garden or pavilion. Sarkej is another excellent example of a structure that combines Hindu and Islamic design.