The “venerable” Hindustan Times newspaper had a very interesting article posted to its website earlier today titled “Brawn and Bikinis.” It briefly profiled two very unusual Indian Americans who will surely capture the interest and imagination of Sepia Mutiny readers:

In further evidence of their remarkable integration into the US mainstream, Indian Americans made their first mark in two facets of US popular culture: an iconic swimsuit calendar and the American football championship game.

A Harvard University student has become the first Indian-American to be featured in the magazine Sports Illustrated’s celebrated swimsuit issue. Sonia Dara appears in the 2010 issue that went on sale in the US on Tuesday.

Another Indian-American made immigrant history on Sunday by becoming the first from the community to be on a team competing in the Superbowl, the American football championship game and the country’s biggest sporting event. That was John Singh Gill of the losing team, the Indianapolis Colts. [Link]

Hmmmm. Those two items seem awfully familiar! Didn’t I just read about both these topics somewhere else on the internet this past week?? Oh. Right. I read about them in two of the last 5 blog posts right here on SM.

You see, Anirudh Bhattacharyya decided to simply take two of our latest posts and combine them into one of his original stories without mentioning or citing SM as the source for the idea. At SM we get ideas for stories from lots of places, including mainstream newspapers. But at least we always cite them. Let us fisk some more, shall we? Take the next paragraph:

The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, first published in 1964, is an iconic American publication. It has served as a launching pad for many future supermodels, including Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum. The issue attracts tens of millions of dollars in advertising.

This paragraph was paraphrased and spliced together straight out of the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for the SI Swimsuit issue. Everything else in the article seems to be lifted without attribution from other sources already published on the web. I hope the Hindustan Times isn’t paying for this mimicry. They should just pay us the money instead since our writers are doing the work. Shame shame. I know your name.

Update: The journalist’s name sounded familiar so I searched my email inbox. I had spoken to Mr. Bhattacharyya back in 2005. He wanted to interview us about Sepia Mutiny.

Hi Abhi,

I got your email from [name deleted]… I’m working on an article on desi blogs and wanted to look at sepiamutiny in that context. Is there a number you can be reached at? And what day and time is usually good for you?

Thanks

Anirudh Bhattacharyya
Editor, mantram
Consulting Editor, South Asia World

So again, we are absolutely thrilled when someone wants to publish a “mainstream” story based on an idea they got from one or more of our posts. Just cite the fact that your idea came from here is all we ask. It’s only fair

Under an odd twist of fate, I find myself for the first time in my life actually interested in the glitz and glamor of Hollywood relocating to the cold hills of Park City, Utah. As mentioned in a previous post, I have had a minuscule bit of involvement with the book-to-movie feature film The Taqwacores which will be premiering at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24th. I have recently been asked to join the Taqwacore madness at Utah, from staying in the rented 4 bedroom punk house with 30 other actors and/or punks, to checking out the punk rock shows in Park City and Salt Lake City featuring The Kominas and Al Thawra. I will be blogging about my Taqx experiences for those two weeks at the tumblr site Taqx at Sundance. Additionally, I will also be crossposting/blogging for MTV Iggy about movies, actors and potentially interviews.

My mind is spinning with the prospect that this little blogger now has a press pass to access one of the coolest film festivals there is. And what an amazing year to join the madness. There are a few films at Sundance which I think are Sepia Mutiny worthy to keep an eye on over the next year:

• First on my list of have to watch movie at Sundance, starring the gorgeous Sendhil Ramamurty and directed by Gurinder Chadha, is It’s a Wonderful Afterlife. I will have the opportunity to interview both of these amazing people and I will try very hard for my readers to not drool too much when Sendhil is sitting across from me.

It looks like a cute movie, and definitely is the shoe in for that one movie for this year’s Desi diaspora flick. I am really excited at the prospect of speaking to both Gurinder and Sendhil about their experience working on the film.

I was interested to see a story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution the other day regarding the “Hindu Temple of Georgia”:

The property of the Hindu Temple of Georgia was sold to the highest bidder Tuesday at a public foreclosure auction in Gwinnett County. It was unclear who bought the nine-acre property at 5900 Brook Hollow Parkway in Norcross following the temple’s default on a $2.3 million bank loan. A Gwinnett County court clerk said it typically takes about 30 days for a deed to be recorded after a foreclosure sale occurs. (link)

The person who ran the temple is the real story:

Lloyd Whitaker, a trustee appointed by a federal bankruptcy judge, said Anderson Lakes had intended to bid on the parcel. Court documents filed by the trustee this week say the temple’s leader and guru, Annamalai Annamalai, has been using the temple to “defeat justice, perpetuate fraud, and to evade contractual and tort responsibilities” since it was set up in 2006.

The trustee’s investigation has so far revealed that Annamalai, a citizen of India, applied for a work visa in 2007 under the pretext of working as an accountant for the temple for $40,000 a year. Yet Annamalai’s business records list his income at upward of $425,000 last year alone, court documents show. He has never filed federal or state tax returns, and the Internal Revenue Service has launched a criminal investigation into Annamalai’s financial dealings.

Financial documents obtained by the trustee also show that Annamalai has funneled money from the temple to other business entities that he controls, to accounts in the names of his wife and two children and to several of his priests. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in temple funds were used pay for the mortgage on Annamalai’s million-dollar mansion in Duluth, as well as his luxury vehicles and credit card bills, according to the court record. (link)

Why might all this be of interest, you may wonder.

Well, this past summer, Abhi and I received a “cease and desist” letter from attorneys representing the priest named in the AJC article asking us to delete a blog post I wrote in 2008 related to the Hindu Temple of Georgia. We also received a subpoena regarding the identity of a commenter on the comments thread following the post (someone who clearly had links to the Temple, not an ordinary commenter).

Update: Maintenance is done. If you notice anything out of the ordinary let us know in the comments!

Kunjan and I will be doing some site maintenance tonight after 10 pm EST. During this time you may not be able to post comments.

This is a major technical upgrade for us. As long as things don’t go really bad (fingers crossed), you shouldn’t notice any difference tomorrow morning. As part of this upgrade, we may also be moving our server (again) to an undisclosed location in the United States (as part of our security measures) and so a DNS update can cause some of you to be looking at the site on the old server (depending on your ISP’s service or where you are in the world).

We will update this post once everything is back to normal. I’ll leave the comments open. After maintenance, please let us know here if you notice anything broken (if comments are working) or email me at chaitan [at] sepiamutiny.com.

Thank you for your support and patience while we continue to keep all the pieces working.

This morning I experienced a personal mini-crisis. When I went to apply my eye cream, specially purchased on my last trip to India I realized - I had just run out. It was like one of those scenes in a movie where time stood still and zoomed in close on the empty container.

Desi girls are brown. Which means that our skin has a high level of pigmentation, unlike the pigmentation of the majority of girls in America. This means that there are probably a few common experiences that we share. At some point in our teenage make-up experimentation stage we were told to purchase the generically colored “tan” foundation and/or concealer despite it not matching our skin tone at all. We wore a ghastly bright red lipstick because someone said it looked good with our skin. Finally is the struggle to find the perfect eye cream to battle those undereye bags that a large percentage of South Asian women are genetically predisposed to and that none of the products sold here cater to.

East Asian women have Shiseido. Ambi is a line of product catering to women of color for lotions and creams. But the Desi girl doesn’t have much else, and a walk through CVS or Sephora or Nordstrom’s makeup counters is liable to give me a panic attack.

Never to fear. In my panicked frenzy this morning, I stumbled across two blogs to the rescue: An Indian’s Makeup Blog and The Indian Make-Up Diva.

Here’s what I love about the blogs: 1) These are Desi American women writing the blogs, so all of the products they use can be found here. 2) They try and review the products with a Desi girl slant. 3) They give easy to understand instructions on how to put on make up. 4) They are written with wit and charm.

Update: If you are seeing this, the move is complete.

We interrupt this blog to bring you this notice that Sepia Mutiny site will be down for maintenance between 2am - 4am EST on 8/26/2009. This includes DNS updates of our domain which would mean that for some users, depending on your location across the globe, the site may not work for up to 24-48 hours. :(

Please bear with us during this transition. Back to the real bloggers …

Our newest guest blogger comes to us from (yes, you guessed it) Philadephia. She is a journalist and blogger who many of you are probably familiar with by her comments on SM, or by reading her blog:

PhillyGrrl is your (almost) typical phillygrrl. She likes talking about Philadelphia all the time. It got a little annoying. Especially after she sent out 50+ forwards every day, annoying her friends and relatives to no small end. Now she annoys the general public with the random things in her head. She also writes for uwishunu and Phawker. [Link]

Don’t worry. She will not be writing only about desis in Philadelphia. She will probably cover some from Pittsburgh as well. I also expect her to reveal some interesting links between South Asian Americans and the Continental Congress. Please join me in welcoming PhillyGrrl.

…It is because our admins are trying to repel what appears to be a Denial of Service attack against the website. We must be doing something right . Personally, I suspect the North Korean government which has never liked us. Please be patient while our great back-end team works a soultion.

Dear readers,

We reached our fundraising goal in about 48 hours and we now have enough in our account to pay our server costs for a little over a year. Chaitan will be removing the Paypal icon later tonight. We would like to extend our deep appreciation to the dozens of you who sent in a contribution whatever the amount! We will strive to live up to the trust you have placed in us.

I would also like to single out the following individuals who sent in especially large sums:

-Our own website admin Chaitan

-Gurminder M.

-Susan F.

-Katherine W.

-Navdeep G.

-Jayanand V.

-AK P.

And for those of you who have sent a check in the mail, I thank you in advance. Any amount we receive over what we need for this next year will simply be applied to the following year (so it will be longer before we ask again).

Thanks again to all the wonderful readers, including those who have given in the past.

It is time once again for us bloggers at Sepia Mutiny to extend our empty hats and ask for donations to keep this blog running for another year. Remember, every time you visit our site it costs us money (my Amex Blue is bleeding red right now). We don’t bother you guys with any money-making ads on this site, nor do we sell out to the man and write what he asks us to write for cold cash. Do you really want us to plaster marriage ads all over the blog?

Much like NPR and PBS hold an annual pledge drive, we are asking you to donate whatever you can via our Paypal link. Keep in mind that we haven’t asked for any donations in over a year. If you don’t want to use Paypal but would rather mail in a check, then write me at abhi [at] sepiamutiny dot com for a mailing address. Donations will keep our website ad-free and crap-free for a year provided we can reach our target of $1000. That shouldn’t be difficult if some of the 7-10 thousand readers we get a day send in a pittance.

In the past year we have redesigned our site and have additional tweaks in the works based on your feedback. Within 24 hours you will also see us featuring artwork by South Asian artists. We would like to continue to make improvements but can only do so with your help now.

In addition to your donations now, over the course of year you can also help us out by buying a book, music, or other item you see written about on our site through our Amazon a-Store link (we’ll soon put up a permanent link). It will give us a nominal commission on each item sold that goes toward paying the bills so as to increase the time between pledge drives. SM can also be download for your Kindle.

Thanks in advance from all of us, and let us know if you have any questions by using our “Contact” link.

I know your problem, I feel your pain. You want to read our website but you’d rather do so when you have free time. Like on the airplane. Where there is no internet access. Or on the subway. Where there is also no access. Or on the toilet. You are also a cutting-edge early adopter and purchased (or are about to) a Kindle from Amazon. Well then, we have something for you. SM’s e-subscription can now be purchased from Amazon.com for $1.99/month. That is about the cost of a mint tea at Starbucks. We get 30% of the $1.99 cost to pay down our server costs. Happy e-reading.

Since several of our “main” bloggers are off enjoying the fruits of summer (Ciao! you know who you are…), we thought we would keep things moving here in the Bunker with another guest blogger, Nilanjana Bhattacharjya. Nilanjana is an ethnomusicologist who teaches at Colorado College. She is also an avid Twitterer, for those of you for whom that means anything. And for the academics in the house, Nilanjana has an essay in a recent collection called Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, which she co-wrote with another friend of mine, on the inner workings of the commercial Indian film music industry as it operates within India, as well as how it is repackaged as it “travels” in the diaspora. Despite the focus on film and music, Nilanjana has lots of interests, including an interest in subcontinental politics — so expect a diverse array of posts.

It’s that time again. Time to welcome another blogger into the bunker at our North Dakota world blogging headquarters. Pavani comes to us with experience at both Nirali Magazine and Daily Cherez. Just like a few of the other bloggers here she was raised in California and can often be spotted in the Bay Area. Please join me in welcoming Pavani to SM.

Dearest SepiaReaders,

I know, it’s been too long. It’s not you, it’s me. This is going to be difficult to tell you, so, um, I hope we can still stay friends…

MTV came calling and I said yes.

I promise that the big huge website and shiny shiny videos had nothing to do with it! It’s not what you think! I’m with a quirky offshoot called MTV Iggy, a website that features interesting videos like this one about Chinlone - the art/dance/sport from Myanmar:

Cool, huh? I’d never heard of it either.

So they asked me to be the site’s Editor (of written things, not video. Would you trust me with anything technical?) and I’ve been rushing through the site, dusting and straightening in anticipating of your visit. (By this I mean I tidied the homepage and threw everything else in the closet.)

Iggy has original music, freewheeling interviews with heavyweights like Fareed Zakaria, celebs like Abhishek Bachchan (seriously, it does!) and John Cho (the new Captain Sulu, but always the Harold to our boy Kumar), a social change initiative to raise awareness about Kashmir, and in the near future, articles, reviews, written interviews and much more.

So please stop by and check it out. Don’t hold back your opinions (as if you ever would!) and tell me what you like, hate, love, loathe, etc. The site is still constantly changing and your feedback would be invaluable. I will still post on Sepia, of course, even about non-Iggy things! But I wanted you to know of this, because even though I have this new boyfriend, you will always be my first love.

I recently received an email from a blog/online magazine called Nazar. They asked if we could link to them in our blogroll (bottom of the comments column). We get requests like this all the time. We have a very simple policy (stated in our FAQ): we only link to blogs that one of us actually reads or follows, even occasionally. However, we always check out each link we receive. Nazar was a pleasant surprise, not only because it has a beautiful design, but because it is really cool to see another (much younger) group of dedicated writers/bloggers who saw a need and took the opportunity to fill a gap:

Nazar - A South Asian Perspective , is a brand new online magazine that caters to the South Asian population at The University of Texas at Austin. One of our primary goals is to bring Nazar out as a print publication at UT and throughout Austin.

Like most good ideas, Nazar was born from the need to fill a gap. The gap was a lack of a publication that catered to the 5,000 South Asians on campus, a community that makes up 10% of the UT population. We wanted to create a magazine that would not only be a representative voice of this community, but would also inform South Asians in detail of the events happening back at home.

This doesn’t just mean a compilation of facts of the major events - anyone, South Asian or otherwise, can get those - but reviews and opinions of them, especially from the perspective of a South Asian living overseas. Just as important will be the coverage of issues and events in the US that affect South Asians living here, be it immigration and foreign policy, the cultural divide, or an imminent performance by a South Asian artist in Austin.

Nazar is the first of its kind, and promises to be an excellent platform for writers, designers, and sales people, amongst others. The road to publishing won’t be easy, but it will be an exciting ride, and we’re thrilled to be part of UT history in the making. [Link]

You got to support dedicated young bloggers. Where is my UMich at? If you know of any similar South Asian American group blogs based out of a university community then please send a tip my way.

With regards to our website’s new design, the single biggest gripe heard from many (including from within the bunker) has to do with the naked header space. Where the banners at? People miss the variety and the colors previously found at the top. Why is the space so darn naked? Well, before answering that question I would like to explain a bit of the philosophy behind the site design. We have tried to make it a more community driven while still maintaining our editorial rights. When the news column was hidden away on its own separate tab it wasn’t being utilized to its maximum potential. Already, since our launch last week, I have been very happy with the quality of news links posted in the right hand column. People tend to step up their game and participate more when their submissions get more face time. We will continue to delete junk and spam from that column and the features (including comments) will soon be working. Likewise, the incorporation of Twitter allows us to communicate with and receive relevant tips from a much larger community.

And that brings us back to the missing banners. There was always a plan.

We are looking for submissions from the Sepia Mutiny community. We want artwork, several original designs, to adorn the top of our website. As with the banners, we hope to rotate the designs. Notice I said “artwork” and not just hastily designed graphics. We want you to wow us and blow SM readers away. This means you have to be pretty darn good at using Photoshop, Gimp, or the equivalent. Instructions follow below the fold.

First off, this coming Monday we will be having the first of several “Meet the Mutiny” posts for the 2008 election cycle. That means that on Monday you all will be interviewing J. Ashwin Madia, the congressional candidate from Minnesota right here. He will be periodically checking SM through the entire day to answer your questions (in the form of comments) below the post I put up Monday. You can ask him about his stance on local or national issues, advice about what it takes to run as a candidate, or any other reasonable questions you might have. If you’ve been watching Iowa and New Hampshire from the sidelines thus far, wondering what this election fuss is all about, now is your chance to get involved and educated about some of the issues that our country is facing, including the war in Iraq (of which Madia is a veteran).

Second, the new Indian magazine TrafficLife is featuring a SM post each month, starting with Amardeep’s post in their inaugural issue. Gosh, I never thought I’d see the day when SM was openly distributed below a highway overpass. Pages containing SM blog posts might potentially even be used as part of the home of someone living under than overpass. Now that is deep.

First, a wee bit o’ liveblogging:

Amardeep’s panel: “Politics of writing- act of writing as political”

Who is your audience?

Amardeep: I’ve written for mags/lit crit…very fixed idea of those readers, they’re like me…left, progressive, academic…on SM, I have no idea who is reading, there are so many types, many armchair warriors. Hindu natl’ists tend to respond to me. Even if these are people you don’t like/detest for their views…you have to be willing to work w/them to define what history is, @ this particular juncture. I find it invigorating, even though it’s rancorous/unpleasant. In a sense, I find it more interesting to talk to more conservative people to work out consensus vision, if consensus is possible.

As a Sikh, do you separate your identity…or is it subjective?

People don’t really seem to care about what I think of mainstream authors, in that sense my identity comes through. They want to hear about E M Forster, instead of my thoughts on Graham Greene…enven though thoughts on Greene more relevant/interesting.

On SM, people see my pic and are expecting a certain perspective to inform what I do.

Mira Kamdar (author of Planet India): On internet, there are multiple audiences and things are instantaneous. Rxns rarely come back to me, they come to the blog sites, in comments. Had to create a sep email add for editorial on India lobby, on recommendation of papers editors…ended up needing it. Internet has complicated audience.

As for authorial identification- it’s always strange, my name is very Indian and my physical appearance isn’t. Am I really a desi person, am I not? As a child, I asked “Mommy which way am I half-n-half, up and down or sideways?” I just write whatever I want to, sometimes I put out my ethnic identity. I felt the need to speak out about Gujurat riots…still get death threats and hate mail for my pains.

I’m one of the only women writing about nuke deal…can you think of many others?

From this time, we’re all looking at a
different picture … ~Portishead

While some of the bloggers went fishing during the summer, some of us were left behind on purpose sigh!. The monkeys have been training us, the new admins, in the ND bunker all summer! After barely getting a passing grade, we set to work and now have something we promised you.

You thought it wasn’t possible anymore to impede your work-day productivity reading Sepia Mutiny. I’ve got News for you. The News tab has been re-designed with new features so that the content can be customized by YOU! Yes, shiny new toys for those fond of the F5 key. Here are the highlights of the changes / new features …

Writing over at Slate.com today, Reihan Salam breaks down a family of dilemmas that many of us are facing in this increasingly, “I need a cool profile” world:

Last week, I launched the Great Facebook Purge of 2007. In one fell swoop, I whittled down a list of 274 “friends” to a more manageable … um, 258. Even weeding out this tiny amount of people was difficult and unpleasant. Almost every subtraction made me wince. While my intention had been to de-friend every hanger-on and casual acquaintance, I just couldn’t do it. All I could stomach is eliminating everyone I’ve literally never met in my life. I still have three “friends” I know only via e-mail, though given that we’re firmly in the Digital Age, I figure this is acceptable. [Link]

Anna wrote a bit about taking the plunge into Facebook a few weeks back and also mentioned that Sepia Mutiny now has its own group. Like everyone else, SM started with Friendster and then briefly flirted with the idea of that idiotic, EvErYoNe HeRe SpElLs LiKe ThIs, Myspace site. Now it seems Facebook is the place to be. For South Asian Americans, who still number only a few million strong in the United States, a profile of you is that much easier to dig out by anyone looking specifically for you, and therefore more relevant I would argue.

How do you decide whether it’s OK to friend someone?

After all, it’s always better to be the rejecter rather than the rejectee. I will now contradict myself: Friending strangers is permissible. If you are going to approach a stranger, don’t do it out of the blue. Never, ever send a random friend request without undergoing some preliminaries, such as trading a few wry observations. The beauty of this “Facebook foreplay,” to use an unfortunate analogy, is that you can always refuse to respond. [Link]

At this point I face a Hobbesian choice: either evolve or perish. After gathering just over 175 friends on Friendster, I woke up one recent morning to realize that I would have to start from scratch again, this time in a younger man/woman’s world. The pit that left in my stomach was unbearable. In this brave new world the men are funnier with their descriptions of themselves, and the women list themselves as Class of ‘07…just beyond my considerable reach. Then there are all the customized “plugins.” I have to list all my favorite bands and tell people all the countries in the world I’ve been to, etc. It’s hard enough picking up chicks at a bar. Now I have to worry whether my world map plugin is sufficiently full (which is why I already counted Guatemala even though I’m not going for another two months ;)

The problem is it doesn’t just stop at Facebook. There is also a social network for book lovers, one for business folks, and even one for your portly cat. When you come home you have to check them all to see if you are still relevant. Sartre would be able to write a masterpiece about this were he still alive. Ask yourselves this simple question: If you don’t have a profile, do you really exist? If I have a profile does it mean I’m just another one of the baying sheep? If I don’t have a profile that sufficiently distinguishes me, how will people know that I’m not a sheep?

But please, don’t let any of this useless pontificating dissuade you from befriending Sepia Mutiny, or me. Even baying sheep need friends.

Please join me in welcoming the latest guest blogger to Sepia Mutiny, frequent commentor KXB. Unlike previous guest bloggers who’ve generally had their own prolific personal blogs, KXB’s presence has mostly been felt in his numerous, well-thought comments as well as his *several times a day* posting to the SM News Tab.

[Update: Uberdesi kindly sent us the link for the ad which inspired it all. Now you can freak out, too!]

The commercial barely disturbed my reverie; I’m thinking about how much I hate moving, and that is exactly what I’ll be doing at work tomorrow, as we prepare for some renovating which couldn’t come at a worse time. At first, I can’t figure out what this spot is advertising, it looks like college kids, seems to focus on shoes and just as I decide that it must be something to do with the latter, I see it.

A girl, in somewhat cute, patent, MaryJane-esque shoes, in a library like setting…using a stack of exactly and approximately half-a-dozen books four books to step on, to reach a higher shelf. Or something. My brain shorts, because I’m so shocked and my inner pragmatist is all, “That’s so unstable! You’re asking for a sprained ankle.” The thought which immediately chases that maternal scolding is, “Eeeek, that’s not very respectful.” And that is why the shoes are “somewhat” cute; I can’t disassociate their shiny happiness from the taboo, the disrespect.

It wasn’t always like this.

Believe it or not, despite all the other random Hindu-lite rituals I grew up with, I never was scolded for touching a book with my feet. I think this had to do with two things:

1) I loved books so much to begin with and was very careful with them, since I’m vaguely OCD about things getting dirty or ruined

2) My room wasn’t so cramped that books were ever on the floor. They were on shelves. Or my desk. Or my bedside table. The floor was for my clothes, much to my parents’ disgust.

I’m surprised that this is also something I didn’t learn from my sundry collection of Hindu ex-boyfriends, though I vaguely remember hearing about it once in a while. For whatever reason, it wasn’t expanded upon or elucidated.

It was you who informed me of this prohibition against disrespect, and it is you whom I think of, in my tiny studio apartment, when I’m trying to re-organize my bookshelves. I take everything out and stack it on the floor, because there’s no other place to put anything and then I dust, rearrange, etc…but once in a while, especially now when I’m hobbling so awkwardly, if my feet even graze the tiniest part of a book or magazine, I freeze, feel guilty and then think of these cultural mores.

Thanks, mutineers. You’ve given me one more thing to get neurotic about…aww, you shouldn’t have. ;)

My high-level point is, this website has changed how I consider or interpret things, in a significant way. I will never think of the Sepoy Mutiny, the word “mutineer”, paneer dosas, Lemurians, ketchup, Scythians or a thousand other things without being reminded of this space.

That’s why when one of you emailed us a tip, which said:

A quiz on Indian independence and the first question is quite, ahem, mutinous.

…which pointed us to a brief, enlightening quiz in the Economist, I smiled and had to see it for myself. Indeed, the first question was special and it’s why I wrote all of this, because I love words and I find them powerful.

When a word’s definition is altered so dramatically, it’s not trivial, not to me. The last word of the first question of that quiz now means something very precious, and it always will. I thought you should know that, because I’m grateful to you for amending the dictionary in my brain, to accommodate such a delightful mutation.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I got a “seven”. ;)

MUTINEERS,

I am saddened to report the sudden and unexpected demise of our beloved friend, Whoa— is dating White not right? (July 28, 2007 -August 1, 2007).

Right was born in an indie coffee shop, in the heart of Washington, D.C., via the twin modern miracles of a stickered, 12” iBook and wifi. In his short life, he profoundly affected many mutineers; Right challenged long-held assumptions, enlightened us about dozens of subjects and was a welcoming, tolerant figure in our community. He will be missed.

In lieu of flowers, Right’s grieving family humbly requests that when SM does its annual plea for donations to keep the site going, a la PBS/NPR, you contribute a rupee or two in his memory, especially since his Mother HATES ADS AND WILL NEVER AGREE TO HAVING THEM ON THIS SITE.

::

I had to close the uber-thread. :(

Many of you are writing to me, letting me know that you can no longer access it. Not sure what’s going on, but I can’t see new comments, either, which means I can’t moderate…so unfortunately, the party is over…not that I needed to do a lot of moderating in the first place. :)

I am delighted; considering the provocative subject material, there was far less ickiness, trolling or flaming than one might expect. All credit for that goes to you.

Thanks for one of the most lively, fascinating and relevant discussions we’ve ever had— and don’t fret, my pets…plenty of you left comments which could be spun off in to so many different threads, about queer dating, seduction via bharatnatyam, evaluating what’s worse— emasculation or exoticization, outting Iyengars, South Asian inter-religious/regional relationships, where to find B-Boy/punker Punjabis, how to procure puliyodarai, internalized self-hatred as evidenced by externalized comment-stupidity, whether I-Bankers are evil, where to find the mythical straight-haired, hyper-maintained desi goddesses whose knickers disintegrate for private equity types, San Francisco’s alternately sucky/fantastic dating scene and of course, HAIR.

More of all that, soon. In the meanwhile, pour a little sum’n out for “Right”, the next time libations are flowing. Sigh. Time to cue Tupac:

Rest in peace young homie, there’s a heaven for a G…

“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.

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.

[Instead of Saturday at noon, the meetup will be on SUNDAY at 12:30. It is still at Amma. Please be noting date and time change— thanks. :)]

But first, a rushed write-up of what went down last time:

• Icebreaker: The battle of the Jessicas- who is hotter, Alba or Biel? There were two poultry-submitted abstentions.
• Adorable Munish changed his vote when he realized he was, in fact, supporting an Alumna of Seventh Heaven: “I thought you meant the woman from Flashdance!”
• Once we started playing, “Who has the tiniest apt” after one of you suggested having meetups in our homes, Jay said we should have used THAT as the icebreaker—“Hi, I’m ___ and I have 400 sq ft!”
• It was the reverse of our college years— Southies Reprazent!
• There was a minor TamBrahm crisis when we discovered that Amma had run out of vada, for the first time in nine years.
• I was smacked. Thrice. By our waiter. You can’t put a price on that kind of abuse.
• Two of the above three spankings occurred as THIRTEEN more people than the sixteen we expected showed.
• Once we ran out of table space: “Start sitting on laps. Sigh. I guess I’ll begin.” Plop.
• What is UP with the lack of RSVPing, meetup-crashers: “This isn’t a wedding, people!”
• Murthy’s Law: Next time, we should reserve the entire restaurant. That way no one will show.
• We actually had to turn people away, for lack of space. :(
• Can’t make it to the bathroom to wash your hands? Use the “Indian Faucet” a.k.a. a poorly-approximated finger bowl via drinking glass
• Subcontinental Drift (we love you!)‘s MySpace page might induce seizures.
• Me to Jay (of the blog Weaselplasty) “All our friends are apparently stand-up comics (and they performed at SD)”
• Said one, “Tortoise porn is available on YouTube.” Said the Terp, all dismissively, “I know about THAT”, as the rest of us exhibited the proper reaction to that statement, which is shock and horror.
• One attendee confessed that while this meetup was fabulous, they had “hobbit envy” about Houston.
• Library Science: it gets no respect
• Second Best line of the meetup: “Why are men always giving me money and then leaving?”
• A Tamil girl who was raised in Bombay tried to reconcile her identities by saying…she was like a “paneer dosa”
• Paneer Dosa has said she will be at the June meetup; that way you can mock her for her metaphor in person! ;)
• I ordered two Salt Lassis and four Madras Kappis.  I received ONE Madras Kappi.
• Lemon Rice for me, dosas for EVERYONE ELSE
• Best line of the meetup: “Your picture on Shaadi.com was so much better!”
• More on Sunny Leone and the greatness of snuff films.
• Despite our most obnoxious attempts to be porntastic in order to clear the restaurant, so more of us could be seated, the packed place wasn’t bothered at all by our antics. Contrast this with Heritage India, where we sent them screaming out the door. It would appear that South Indian families are immune to our offensiveness. :)

Now, after reading the merriment-filled minutes of our last meetup, who feels like getting together again for more? :) I’m craving dosa and you, well, after I published this post, I learned that you are ALL craving dosa, ALL the time.

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

WHEN: SUNDAY, JULY 1. 12:30 PM.

WHY: Because you nosy little monkeys want to pepper me for non-existant gossip about the Mutiny.

Think of it as a post-Subcontinental Drift “survivors’ brunch”. Kill your hangover with Madras Kappi and Rasam! :D

::

As for New York…Maybe mid-late July? :)

::

San Francisco? End of August, we’ll keep you posted.

…but we promise to throw back the fish and not hurt them for real.

Folks, we have been writing on this blog and ruining your work-day productivity for almost three years now. We’ve had over 8 million visits, 4500 posts, and 143000 comments (all moderated by a single intern who is just not looking too good these days). Most of us are totally and completely burned out. We have been cooped up in our North Dakota bunker for so long now that we don’t even know what an i-Phone is. This is no way to live. It isn’t even fit for our monkeys. Some of us really need to take a break and get out and see some action once in a while (errrr…by which I mean play sports and go on vacation or something).

You may have noticed that the number of posts on SM have decreased in frequency over the past couple of months as everyone takes a bit of time out for themselves. This slow burn will continue through the end of the summer. We might bring in some new faces and lose some old ones but the Mutiny is not dead. Our new site admins are also working on more community-based features and on ways to make the News Tab more interactive by allowing commenting and ranking of stories there.

Enjoy your summer and please say hello if you see any of us outside of North Dakota on our walkabouts.

Dear Readers,

Paul and Kunjan, Sepia Mutiny’s two website administrators, have done a great job keeping the Mutiny running for this past year. Now, however, we are looking for a group of people to take over the reins from them and guide this website to the next level. We are not just looking for people who are enthusiastic and got the skillz (Movable Type, PHP, etc.) to keep SM readers happy. In addition, we are looking for people with the TIME to actually implement their vision for what Sepia Mutiny could be. This should be a hobby that you are passionate about. Here is a partial list of the things we want to do in the near term (although the full list would blow your lenghas off):

• A new News tab modeled after Digg with comments, comment rating, and registered users.
• Website re-design. We want a cool new look.
• User-submitted posts.
• Great ideas that we haven’t thought of yet that will make us among the most innovative blogs on the block.

We are looking for people who can put in as much time and effort in running the site as the bloggers put in to writing posts. Paul and Kunjan will teach you the back-end of our current website and you can take it from there.

Please email me if you are interested and meet the requirements:

abhi [at] sepiamutiny dot com

If you have a technical question to determine if you are qualified then email Kunjan:

kunjan [at] sepiamutiny dot com

If you know someone who is perfect for this job then send them a link to this post.

Alternatively, if you have suggestions for how to improve our website then please click here to send it to us instead of leaving them in the comments.

Thanks all!

We’ve had some rough times in the bunker…when Manish and Vinod first broke up…when Ennis was told he couldn’t smuggle anymore adoring groupies in and pass them off as interns…when Manish and Vinod broke up again…when the lemurs went on strike to protest the lack of parties…when one of our guest bloggers developed a very rare allergic reaction to…ah, never mind.

My point is, what we faced before were minor challenges; this has been a rather difficult week, as we confronted far more sobering matters, which affected us all. This week, we dealt with real pain, as tragedy reminded us of how fleeting life actually is. Such “big news” always means more traffic, which means more moderating and more possibilities for this or worse, this.

So, I’m a little down right now and I know many of you are, too. This is what I propose to lift our sepia spirits: an eleventh-hour sort of meetup at reliable and hospitable Heritage India this weekend. Perhaps what this community needs is…more community. Let’s bond, y’all! You know you want to. All are welcome: trolls, lurkers, smurfs and elves included. Vogons, however, will not be tolerated, since it’s highly possible that they might be feeling poetic and no one deserves that.

We can do brunch like we did the first time we were there, at the third DC Meetup or we can have dinner like we did the last time we were there, at the fourth DC meetup which was also our first-ever SM Channukah extravaganza. No, that wasn’t convoluted at all. ;) The more significant issue is that we haven’t met up in FOUR MONTHS.

Dinner on Saturday, April 21 at 8ish

or

Brunch on Sunday, April 22 at Noonish it is!

Either way, I feel like it is an apposite time to revisit Heritage; I’ve had a sad sort of craving for Golgoppas and I’d like to sate that, in memory of someone else who loved them.

FYI: Heritage is Metro accessible (Red line).

Heritage India Brasserie
1337 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 331-1114

Welcome to Sepia Mutiny. If this is your first time visiting and you found us by reading the MSNBC/Newsweek article which commenced with:

The bodies had barely been removed when the racial epithets started pouring in. Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old identified as the killer of 32 on the Virginia Tech campus, may have lived in the state since his elementary school days, but to the bigots in the blogosphere it was his origins in Korea that mattered most. “Koreans are the most hotheaded and macho of East Asians,” wrote one unnamed commentator on the Sepia Mutiny blog. “They are also sick and tired of losing their Korean girlfriends to white men with an Asian fetish.”

then please understand two very important truths:

1) Four out of the five comments which followed that quoted ignorance repudiated it consummately…

For shame.

This entire post decried stereotyping, and look at what you wrote about Koreans. My thoughts are with anxious students facebooking each other, heartbroken family members and everyone else affected by this tragedy. How can yours even go there? [SM]

2) “one unnamed commentator” does not speak for or represent this amazing, progressive, close-knit community

In fact, the views in the soundbite which MSNBC/Newsweek opportunistically and irresponsibly highlighted are NOT shared by the vast majority of those who write, comment or lurk here; they are the exception, not the rule on a blog which was created to enlighten, not divide. We are saddened that such a reputable and established source of news would misrepresent our site’s purpose and imply that the words of a rogue commenter are somehow indicative of the work we tirelessly try to do.

The bitter irony of this situation is that this website exists to create positive change and yet we were mischaracterized by an article about the valid concerns of the Korean American community after Monday’s massacre; as South Asian Americans, we sympathize and understand such issues because we are far too familiar with the concept of “backlash” ourselves.

We pray that Korean Americans are spared what Balbir Singh Sodhi suffered, that the rage which is to be expected after something so senseless isn’t misdirected so that it harms even more innocent people.

Just as one anonymous person who isn’t even a regular contributor here shouldn’t tarnish the reputation of an entire blog, one troubled, lost soul who took his pain out on innocents shouldn’t tarnish the reputation of an entire ethnic community. We are all suffering; let’s put aside the generalizations, stereotypes and impotent rage and work instead towards healing ourselves, our communities, our world.

::

This is what they have to say for themselves:

Dear Mr. Reeves,

I appreciate your note. Our intention was not to chastise Sepia Mutiny in any way—many blogs have been receiving derogatory comments, and Sepia is just one example. I think that anyone who visits the site will quickly find out what you speak of: that it’s an open forum for commentary, and with that comes the possibility of potentially-hateful comments. We would hope that our readers who are concerned about this site check it out and find that out for themselves. Unfortunately, unless we’ve introduced factual errors into a piece we do not print retractions, and we stand by this piece. I appreciate your input and interest and will keep it in mind as we move forward in our coverage.

Respectfully,
Jessica Bennett

Thanks for writing them, Maurice. We appreciate your efforts to rage against the useless, sloppy, too-proud-to-admit-they-erred machine.

I am heartsick. I want no part of what has been occurring in “my house” as of late.

When Abhi approached me about starting a group blog to highlight “brown” aspects of the 2004 presidential race, I immediately agreed to take part. Why wouldn’t I? This project would seek out and illuminate that which the mainstream media couldn’t be bothered with— discrimination against a journalist with a South Asian name, the disrespect shown to our culture by a state branch of a major political party, essentially, the desi angle to everything around us. We would light the political and social night. We could be a beacon to every other South Asian American who felt exactly what we felt, lived through what we had, questioned what we did.

As an Orthodox Christian, the concept of “light” is sacred to me; I stood with almost a thousand people last Saturday night, waiting for our priest to throw open the doors to the altar, holy fire held high. The altar boys would take bits of that flame for their own candles, then fan out and pass the light on to the first row of parishioners, who would turn and continue the cycle, one pew lighting the candles behind it until everyone was bathed in the glow that only comes from flame and wax. The ritual which had taken place for over a millennia demonstrated how consummate darkness would always be destroyed by light. Light, a symbol of hope, a symbol of truth. Light, a visual reminder of the triumph of good over evil.

Evil does live in the dark. It lurks in shadows where it ensnares victims of rape, gagging them with shame while concomitantly extinguishing their inner flames.

One of the reasons why rape survivors do not come forward is because they are terrified that they will be doubted. They will be humiliated again, this time by those who should know better, who work for justice. Bruised and broken, they are forced to relive their ordeal while relating it to cynics and skeptics. The burden is on the survivor and that isn’t right. Yes, sometimes people lie and manipulate sympathy but that never justifies being unkind.

Once, in my Freshman-year theology class, Sister Veronica was asked about whether one should always provide alms for beggars. “Sister…isn’t it true that these people are bums? That they are going to just spend the money on drugs or booze? That’s what my Dad said and that’s why I don’t give them money anymore.” Sister Veronica’s face became serene.

“Child, you have been taught since kindergarten to see the face of Christ in everyone you meet, no matter who they are. Yes, even those whom you refer to as ‘bums’ have a divine inner light because just like you, they are children of God. They deserve to be treated that way.”

“But sister-“

“No buts. Even if they are going to use the pennies you give them for something else, even if they are lying about how they need money for food, even if they plan to buy drugs, you must believe that they are truly in need. Only God is allowed to judge others. And that unfortunate soul really might be in need—how would you know if they weren’t? And wouldn’t it be awful if you let your preconceived notions, your assumptions prevent you from doing what is right? From helping someone who truly needs it? You never know someone else’s story, so don’t act as if you do. Act as if you don’t. And act as if the best, not the worst is what is true.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bunker is expanding! Things are about to change here at the bunker, and we could sure use some extra hands.

We are in the process of implementing some new features on the site. The whole Sepia gang has got some neat ideas in store for you. Unfortunately, with mine and Paul’s growing commitments we haven’t been able to focus on the overhaul of the design, and adding other new features at the rate we expected to.

The new feature that we are working on at this moment, is a pretty standard php/mysql app [the exact details are classified ;) ]. Some of the ground work has already been laid. However we need some PHP hackers that can help us speed up the development. We are looking for someone who can program in php proficiently, knows a bit of mysql, and can handle a bit of CSS.

So if you can volunteer some time, then email admin [at] sepiamutiny.com, and we will get back in touch with you.

As SM readers know, we recently closed down our Los Angeles bureau offices. Apparently the California congressional delegation was pissed at the loss in state revenue attributed to our closure. They couldn’t take our money through taxation no more and all the local restaurants that popped up to feed our large staff are now without customers. As retribution the Mutiny was being threatened with increased congressional oversight unless we threw California a bone. Well folks, both California and our readers are in luck. Our newest blogger comes to us straight from Sacramento (Sac-town I think it’s called). Please welcome Naina Ramajayan of the blog Peter Sellers is Dead. What do they blog about over there?

We don’t have a running theme. We’re just here to talk trash — about people in the news, or people we know, or sometimes even each other. [Link]

We could always use a little more trash talk in the bunker.

GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY.

phew There we go, I just had to get that out of my system.

Oh hang on. Gay Pakistani male! Gay Pakistani male!

Right, I think we’re done on that front.

And on this particular front as well. My time at Sepia Mutiny has—at long last—come to an end, and I can say without a single doubt that I’m glad I got to close out 2006 on such a bright note. It has been an experience, tumultuous and otherwise, and at the risk of loading up on the frommage, I think I’d be the poorer without it.

It gives me hope, sometimes. This community—because that’s what it is, a community, not just a place to write about brown-people-stuff—isn’t just dynamic and interesting and occasionally thought-provoking; it’s all of those things AND the whole damn’ bag of chips. It thrives on everything (clusterfucks be damned!—and secretly enjoyed!), and it makes me glad that I was incredibly, incredibly wrong when I thought to myself at its inception, wow, I wonder how long it’ll take for that site to tank, it’s a good idea, but I just don’t think enough people will be interested.

In case you were wondering, it’s taking me a while to write this post because I’m single-finger-typing while trying to get my ankle out past my molars with the other hand.

It was one of the things I felt most keenly while at university in the US. A lot of us homeland desis tend to automatically assume that just because we were born in South Asia, we’re somehow better-informed and more capable of analysing/providing information about the region than people of desi origin who weren’t necessarily raised there. And I can’t speak for everyone, but some of us also felt very marginalised in the sense that we didn’t think or feel that we had enough of a presence to be a viable social group beyond the simple stereotypes (OK well, I like men and make no bones about that so I definitely stood out, but you see where I’m going with this) that everyone’s so well-aware of.

And once again, I was wonderfully, gloriously, terrifically wrong. The mould has been broken, the restrictions shattered and a bhangra danced all over them while Amitabh comes out of retirement once more to chew the scenery and Nusrat’s voice soars.

It’s utterly delightful, it really is.

Every good mutiny needs a photographer or two associated with it. Someone needs to document the “grand struggle,” just as Henri Cartier-Bresson documented some of Gandhi’s. To start off 2007 we have a little treat for you. Preston Merchant, the photographer shooting away at many of our NYC meet-ups, is traveling in Kenya right now and will be training his eye and camera on the Indian diaspora there. Before he proceeds we should clear up a few questions you might have:

Statement: Oh, Merchant! Way to represent the Parsees. Finally, some more diversity on SM.

Response: Nope. Preston is white. He is not Parsi (not that you can’t have a white Parsi).

Statement: Whoa. What’s up with letting a colonialist in the house?

Response: Remember the movie Lagaan? How all the villagers banded together to play cricket and won over the hearts of their colonialist oppressors, and how Amir Khan even won the eye of that one white British lady? It is the same thing. SM is like that cricket team but Preston thankfully doesn’t sing.

Preston isn’t just over there taking pictures for no reason. He is working on a book titled IndiaWorld about the Indian diaspora and has already visited South Africa, Dubai, Trinidad, and Guyana, in addition to his work here in the States. In Kenya he will be focusing especially on the Ismaili Muslim community. I’ll let him explain to us about that though. Get ready for a good flogging.

In case it isn’t already abundantly clear, SM would like to annouce that we have just opened our first southern U.S. bureau offices in Houston, Texas. For all of you Texas lurkers and commenters, now is your time to represent. We may have our first Texas meet-up in February. Make sure you guys fill out the Events Tab with pertinent local events as well.

Banner courtesy of Xnomad.com

The reason why no ideology has ever created, let alone sustained, the world it envisioned, is that by definition it could not account for unintended consequences. The same is true of more modest ventures. A war meant to be short and sweet turns out anything but. A campaign meant to steamroll the opposition clears the field of all rivals but one, the most dangerous and unexpected. Observing something alters its nature; naming it alters its meaning. If you’ve ever planned anything – a career, a vacation, a party – you know this already.

And so, when things happen – interesting things, significant things, things that surprise us and thus lead us to feel – they result only partly from deliberate action, and as much from the gremlins of serendipity, who can inhabit any of us for any period of time. Thrust into greatness, we signify; the moment passes, the world changes, we fade to obscurity.

Are you having a macaca moment yet? In 2006, desis were thrust into greatness in the person of S. R. Sidarth. Senator Allen’s view of Sidarth’s ethnic happenstance differed so radically from that of a majority of Virginia voters, that the (near-) accident of the brother being there set in motion events leading, it is argued, to the change of power in Congress.

Macaca was about revealed perception. The perception was Allen’s; but the revelation stems from Sidarth. Without Sidarth, the perception would not have been revealed. The tree might have fallen in the forest, but no one would have heard.

This is old news to us; in this community at least, we’ve followed the macaca story from the start and have no disagreement as to its significance. Where we differ is in what we make of it for ourselves, the extent to which we identify with Sidarth or the fate we wish on the word macaca itself.

Old news, yes. But this weekend Sidarth was made to reappear, once more in his capacity as the embodiment of macaca, as two news outlets produced their round-up of people who mattered in 2006. Salon names Sidarth its Person of the Year. Time’s Person of the Year is You – you, the diffuse and disparate emanators of content, the users who generate that which is user-generated – and Sidarth is one of the Yous the magazine profiles.

It’s interesting to compare the interpretations that each of these outlets apply to Original Macaca. Salon, the established survivor of first-generation Web journalism, sees in him less the agent of a brave new world of representation than an embodiment of an America undergoing demographic and attitudinal change. Time, a behemoth of a pre-Internet era when The Press told The Public what to know and believe, now celebrates Sidarth as one of a non-organized army of little people upending the plans and certitudes of the great.

Both treatments have in common, however, that ultimately they are not about Sidarth – not the “real” Sidarth, biologically and spiritually unique, but what he seems through various filters. It was the year of You perceived and revealed, by your own doing and by that of others. That trend will continue, as attested by the fact that you read this blog, perhaps comment, perhaps have established an identity here and elsewhere on the Web.

We are learning that representation matters. We manage our identities lest others manage them for us; in a way the two processes are dialectically the same. What remains is spirit: mercurial, contradictory, and if we will it, potentially free.

Is this the last ever Los Angeles Meet-up? Hard to say. Why risk it? The date is unfortunately non-negotiable since Sepia Mutiny’s Los Angeles Bureau is closing its doors in December and relocating to our newly purchased state-of-the-art blogging facility in Houston, Texas (no state taxes in TX).

Time: After 7p.m. (and until the cops come knocking).

Place: TBD. Check this post early next week (or check our Events Tab).

Who: Last time we had like 40-50 people show up and it was a damn good time (ended at 2a.m.).

I will post another reminder on the Tuesday before the meet-up. Mark you calendars now. Last time we met at the Golden Gopher. I’m still checking out options for this one.

RSVP to me if you can come abhi [at] sepiamutiny . com

Friends, mutineers, countrymen, lend me your ears. There is something that has been bothering all of us here at our North Dakota headquarters for quite some time now. We talk about it often in hushed tones. It is the extreme dearth of fresh new desi bloggers out there. We are ever vigilant and constantly searching for freakishly interesting and smart bloggers to be pulled into the Mutiny and to blog tirelessly for you. We can’t keep doing this forever on our own, especially since many of us are going through transitions in our busy lives. To be perfectly honest, I think that when the time comes we will suddenly and viciously pull the plug on SM. It will be just after the moment we feel that we’ve got no blog left to give and nobody else is capable of picking up the keyboard to mutiny forward. If you like spending time on this website then don’t say we didn’t warn you. I sometimes wonder, if we never existed would more of you be blogging now? Must we burn Rome to save Rome?

So what am I asking? Some of you need to start blogging and do so with a purpose. Almost all of the guests we’ve had were bloggers even before SM was created. Where’s the new blood? We aren’t looking for suggestions like, “Hey what about so-and-so? Why don’t you ask them to guest.” Please don’t use the comments following this post for that. We wouldn’t be worth the ink on our blog unless we were also good scouts. We scout bloggers, sometimes for months, before inviting them to guest for you. Most often we find them by the content of their blogs, especially if they consistently leave interesting comments on SM or expounding on something they read here first. We are scouting several of you right now as a matter of fact.

As you may have noticed SM is very secretive (as all good mutinies must be to survive infancy), but for the first time ever I am revealing the basic requirements we look for in new bloggers (besides being desi). No surprise here:

1) Must be North American or have lived in North America for a significant amount of time.

2) Has a fabulous voice (voice = great writing + interesting perspective) and can cover a wide variety of topics (not just a small range of topics that they know really well). With a little research and a little snark they should be at ease writing about the policies of the International Monetary Fund or Diwali Barbie in under 90 minutes.

3) Have experience with blogging or internet publishing. We are too busy to teach people how to publish something on the web and how to use basic html tags. If you’ve run your own blog for a while then all this should be easy. Thus, if you aren’t already a blogger then you probably won’t be a good fit until you become one, even if you just won the Booker (just kidding Kiran…call me).

4) Be a fearless and passionate writer, not someone who worries how they “sound.”

I have often said that Sepia Mutiny is the best thing I’ve done with my life during the past two years. Thanks to this blog, I have been given ridiculously cool opportunities (BlogHer, NPR, starring roles in academic papers) as well as a platform to say anything. That latter truth still knocks me over and leaves me breathless. I get to speak to thousands? Who am I? NO ONE. And yet, you trust me, you like me, you respect me enough to listen to me, even when you know you probably won’t agree with me. That’s love, yo. Every single day, when I wake up and hit my SM bookmark, I’m filled with a little bit of awe that this is real, that this community exists, and that you’ve allowed me to be part of it.

I am so thankful for all of you, commenters, lurkers, haters alike. :)

I know I tend to express it whenever there’s a meetup, because that’s the logical moment to do so, but I feel this way all the time. What a dynamic, accomplished, enlightened, fascinating group you all are! What a community you have helped create! I hear it time and again, “I never had desi friends, I didn’t do SASA in college…but I love SM.” I always reply, “it’s like we collected you and your counterpart, from every school in America, katamari-like and brought all of us ‘different’ desis together…which is why we seem to get along.”

Whatever we have done, it is magic. Our meetups are proof of this. Ever expanding, multi-hour-spanning, shimmering parties where disappointment and boredom are impossible, where we fall a little more in love with each other and thus weave this mutinous web tighter, which we leave with aching faces because we have smiled and laughed so much. As I look back on 2006, a truly difficult year for me and my family, I am struck by how the majority of good memories I take with me involve this blog and all of you who live within it. You who refresh SM constantly, you who show up, you, who care.

Have I told you how much I dig all of you? :) If it’s not clear yet, read on…this is a list in progress, I’ve typed it during breaks from my cousins’ traditional drunken Thanksgiving feast and it is by no means complete.

This is what I am currently, mutinously thankful for:

• absolutgcs- for being a regular and for your encouragement, at a moment when I truly needed it.

• Al Mujahid- for being comfortingly familiar, for sticking to your guns, for employing sarcasm to great effect, for being pro-debauchery!

• Amitabh- for being so devoted to language (I sweat that, I’m the same way), for leaving memorable comments (one is still stuck in my head, it may inspire an entire post), for being here, for forgiving my senseless omission of you during the first two rounds.

• Arzan- for hosting one of the most cozy meetups, ever. for cooking all of us yummy Parsi food, for being one of my favorite regulars (back when you were still here), for being so veg-friendly. :)

• Asha’s Dad- for sick taste in music and even sicker skillz with the comments. Your 55s give me chills and your mere presence makes this space better.

Once upon a time (i.e. in 2003), a neophyte blogger considered the layout of her site and wondered if she should change her sidebar. Never mind the hilarious fact that just two months before that moment, she was unaware of what a “sidebar” was— now she was scrutinizing hers, specifically the “Recently Updated Blogs” content which TypePad offered as an option.

Solidarity with other TypePadders was good, but she had not had much luck when it came to whichever link she whimsically chose to explore. She had never bookmarked one of these random blogs and she probably never would. Like this one for example, newly at the top of the list…”Venial Sin”. Fantastic name, the erstwhile Catholic school girl thought…it’s probably going to be an even more impressive disappointment, because of it.

Perhaps her cynicism unjinxed the ritual; this time, she didn’t just bookmark, she froze, then devoured. Then, she fell in blog-love. “Venial Sin” wasn’t just a reference to a minor transgression against God— it was a nom de plume for the best blogger she had ever read. She was absolutely enchanted.

Despite its life-altering role in her infatuation, “Recently Updated Blogs” was heartlessly deleted. In its place, she created a newly expanded blogroll, which finally included a fellow TypePadder, along with the following description of his site: scathing, coruscating, ennui-slaying perfection. Three years later, those words are truer than ever and best of all, now you can think them, too.

The latest Guest Blogger to visit our bunker might just be the greatest, mutineers. Give a suitable welcome to Sin.

It is with great relief and extreme sadness that I leave the mutiny today ending the sequel to my Mutiny-Wallah gig. I think there may have been a way to bribe the head macacas to hang around the bunker blogging some more, but my lawyer and I have decided against it. I came back on board to Sepia Mutiny months ago with the expectation of blogging on the 2006 elections and am leaving today having spent more time researching cyber law than should be legal (bad pun, I know). You didn't think I was going to leave without sharing some of the research I dug up, now would you?

1) It is a misdemeanor in the state of California to be sent multiple e-mails after you sent one that said stop contacting me, even if the perpetrator is in another state (check to see what your state's laws are). My advice: never block or delete e-mails until you've accumulated enough evidence, never respond to the e-mails except for a one liner that says 'stop contacting me' and file a report with the police immediately.

2) Those IP addresses are a tricky thing -- they are often anonymous to protect the bloggers and commenters. But IP addresses can be tracked with a court order, and sites like MySpace, Friendster, or Blogspot have a wealth of IP information that they have to give to the police if given a court order, especially if the perpetrator used those sites to contact you. Also, if you do blog, get a sitemeter, and monitor those IP addresses religiously.

3) If you Flickr, photolog, whatever -- copyright your pictures. According to blog laws, sites such as Brown People can post your pictures up legally as long as they link to the source. If you copyright your pictures, they are not allowed to take your image. The laws around image copyright infringement are pretty harsh (known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and the Google law team is standing by to make sure Blogspot users don't infringe this aspect of the law. You should copyright your blog too.

4) Save everything, take screenshots (go to File, Save page as...) of everything. In a world where the Internet can be so easily manipulated and deleted, it is important that you save things immediately. Not just saving e-mails in your inbox, but take screen shots of profiles, blogs, websites and accumulating your data. Both your lawyers and law enforcement will be pleased to see that you have evidence to back your claim.

The rest of the list continued after the jump...

A gentle reminder that the NYC Mutiny Meetup is this SATURDAY at Epistrophy Cafe. I believe it will be Siddhartha’s first meetup and probably number 4 or 5 for me. Macaca’s far & wide, commenters & lurkers, bloggers & illiterate are all welcome to attend.

Based on the comments to the original announcement post, this one’s got potential to hit new heights of attendance. I’d give it even money that we’ll beat out September’s record-breaking LA meetup.

In contrast to the Desi fast food joints we’ve hit for past NYC meetups, Epistrophy is a wine bar. Siddhartha will be the honorary sommelier for the evening and I’ll be tossing my hat into the ring should the subject of California reds hit the fore.

Because of other evening engagements, we’re “officially” scheduling this one a tad on the early side at 5-7pm. So, you should be able to stop by without tipping off your cool crew that you met your other, ‘real’ friends on a blog. Of course, if prior NYC meetups are any indication, there’s likely to be a good sized group lingering till the wee hours engaged in senseless acts of debauchery.

The election is over, and it leaves our community divided. We have happy macacas, upset macacas, indifferent macacas, and those who object to the term macaca. But surely the one political development of the last couple of days that has won broad-based approval is the apparent defeat of Sen. George Allen, for the reasons we all know. And in response, there have been calls for a party.

We’d love to fly all of you out to the bunker, where we could throw an outrageously debauched event away from prying eyes. Maybe someday. But for now, we offer the next best thing. On behalf of the whole crew, Vinod and myself invite you to The Sepia Mutiny “November to Remember” New York City Meetup, Saturday, November 18, 5:00 - 7:00 PM, at Epistrophy Cafe, 200 Mott Street (between Spring and Kenmare).

We’ve chosen this timing so that folks can join us and still go on to their fabulous New York evening activities, so no excuses! Epistrophy is a low-key, high-quality wine-oriented cafe with small food, both veg and non-veg, and reasonable prices. It’s owned by a couple from Sardinia and named for a Thelonious Monk classic. After 7, those who are so inclined can move on to dinner somewhere, but in the spirit of Monk, we’ll improvise.

FAQ: Regulars are welcome. Lurkers are welcome and encouraged. Aunties and Uncles are welcome. Aishwarya Rai, Kal Penn, M. Night Shyamalan, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Bipasha Basu, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, Dr. Vijay, Salman Rushdie, Laloo Prasad Yadav, are all welcome. Macacas and non-macacas are welcome. Exotifiers and orientalists are welcome. Those who aren’t welcome are velcome.

Please to kindly RSVP in the comment thread, so we get a sense of numbers and whether we need to move the party to Bungalow 8 or Madison Square Garden. Zindabad!

People of the tri-state area and visitors from afar, mark your calendars! Hot on the heels of the successful meet-up that Ennis convened this past weekend in Chicago, we’re taking things to the next level with a New York City meet-up Saturday, November 18, co-sponsored by Vinod and myself. That’s right! With the two of us setting the edges, there will be room for all at this one: libertarians and leftists, old heads and young bloods, sushi snobs and beer swillers, geeks and freaks, lawyers and miscreants, wheatish and homely, cisgendered and transgendered, atheists and mystics. Caste no bar!

Now, we haven’t yet selected the location, but this will be a late afternoon/early evening meetup, so that all you macacas can stop by en route to whatever fabulousness your Saturday night portends. You have plenty of advance notice, so no typical New York prior-commitment bullshit. Expect a 5 PM start time, a centrally located venue that serves a decent glass of wine, and a gathering of sepia-toned luminaries the likes of which the world has rarely seen. Ya heard!

I now have a new goal in my pseudo-internet-life -- to somehow get my picture into the new addictive blog, Brown People. What is this "Brown People Blog"? Why it is almost the best form of wasting a Friday work day ever (second only to creating 55Friday Fictions.)

random photos of brown people.

(thats it. that's the concept.)

How you use it up to you. . .as a reminder that different brown people are doing their thing, use it as detox from reading 17 magazine, use it to find ideas for a haircut, to remind yourself you're not an invisible freak, to procrastinate on your postcolonial studies paper...whatever you please.)(this is of course not one of those stupid rating things though.). [link]

The bloggers on this site are anonymously fabulous in their selections of brownz ranging from the SM (in)famous Kal and Parminder all the way to the non-famous brown faces on flickr. Our very own ANNA has even made an appearance to the site. I liken this site much to a desi version of the high school yearbook -- you never quite know how to get your picture in the yearbook, but you know it's significant to your popularity when your photo is in it.

Come on, it's a Friday. Check out the site. They source all of the pictures so it has a real potential to suck you into hours of brownz web surfing. To quote Ismat, how are you going to use this site?

This weekend, I was in the Bay area to attend a board meeting for the youth publication, Wiretap. Imagine my pleasant surprise to find a fellow desi blogger also on the board with me, Samhita Mukhopadhyay. A former desi riot grrrl, Samhita is now a blogger/editor for the popular Feministing.

The site editors and founders are motivated by their belief that young women are rarely given the opportunity to speak on their own behalf on issues that affect their lives and futures. Feministing aims to provide a platform for women to comment on and analyze these issues. Roughly 25,000 unique users per day visit the site. [link]

Sweet, a young desi voice in the historically non-diverse feminist movement! And a blogger! In a recent interview done with Alternet, Samhita informs us of the intersections of activism and blogging, a topic that I find fascinating and have written about through the lens of the South Asian American movement before.

But aren't there drawbacks to leading a feminist movement through blogs?

Samhita: Well, this is our activism; engaging with other bloggers. But yeah, we talk all the time about whether or not we are organizing the people we talk about or if we're just computer nerds. We want to alliance-build. But is it always safe to sit behind your keyboard? No. I still don't always feel confident or safe...

People come to the site, read my blog and say things like "Don't get out of hand." This is still the dominant view, and there is still such a gendered power imbalance, and it's easy to get caught up in all that and think, "Well, you're right." People have told me I'll never have a journalism career. Some say my writing is unbalanced and anti-white. But it's not, not in this context. I write what I feel and what I see, through the lens of post-colonial theory.[link]

A quick perusal through her posts on Feministing show entries that do just that and highlight transnational feminist issues: the Hudood Ordinance, Columbian women try sex ban, Pakistani rape laws, and women praying in Mecca.

Back in 2004, I attended the March for Women's Lives in DC with a small contingent of desi women - all of us decked in 'This Is What a Feminist Looks Like' gear. We were the only desi females we saw at the march. This was frustrating particularly because I feel that the desi women issues that affect all of us in this community, are often pushed to the boundaries of the mainstream feminist movement. Our issues of glass ceilings, hate crimes, higher rates of HPV, and lower weight babies are SAA feminist issues. For these reasons, I often feel that there is a certain amount of distance people like to create with the word "feminist", especially in our community. But what does it really mean?

Now that we’ve been here awhile and are convinced the new bunker is secure, we’re growing weary of the drab interior and long for the good old days of gilded ceilings, flowing sequins and all around palatial excess… while all this may well have existed only in my head, it’s time nonetheless to start decorating this joint and make things bling a little.

The current Sepia Mutiny interface has certainly served us well, but the truth is that it is also showing signs of age and we’re past due for a bit of an overhaul, in particular to allow for future expansion and improved usability. Don’t worry, we’re not going all MySpace on you guys, and we’re not about to bombard you with annoying pop-ups and classmates.com flash banners encouraging you to stalk your high school sweetheart. We will still be the Mutiny you love, just a little bit nicer and all dressed up.

So, if you are a bad-ass graphic designer, you drop shadows in your sleep, you hallucinate in alpha channels, and you can spare a few cycles to help us with our upcoming efforts, please email us (minus the caps) with samples of your work or a pointer to your portfolio. In particular, we are looking for someone who excels in clean and measured web design, and someone with logo and branding experience (this could be the same person). Please note that we are not seeking programming or technical help at this time. Once we gauge response, I will follow-up on the specifics of what we need and how best to get things rolling.

We can’t offer much in return for your efforts, other than a link to your website and the collective thanks of all the Mutineers, though if you do a really good job, maybe we’ll throw in a couple of monkeys macacas and a night with the intern… and believe me, that’s nothing to scoff at.

On Tuesday it will be one year since Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Spike Lee’s HBO documentary “When the Levees Broke” and Tulane historian Douglas Brinkley’s book, The Great Deluge have recently appeared. Both are extraordinary, and if you vote or pay taxes in the United States, you owe it to yourself to watch and read what collectively we allowed to happen.

If you are stirred to learn more, one of your next ports of call should be the website of Maitri Venkat-Ramani, New Orleans resident and citizen journalist extraordinaire. If you have a lot of work today, you may want to delay checking out her site as you are likely to spend hours rummaging the archives and following links to the testimonials, fact compilations, photo sets, commentaries and other resources that she and her fellow New Orleans citizen-journalists have developed for the past 359 days.

A few days ago, in a reflective mood, the sister wrote this:

A displaced resident of New Orleans and a loud civic voice, I had no stomach for superficial news and what Christiane Amanpour describes well as “happy-camper war-and-disaster-zone travelogue.” I was confused and frustrated from not knowing what was going on with the city, so I pacified myself by stepping in as a reporter and turning VatulBlog into a bullhorn in the NOLA PA system network. This was my catharsis and each time I received an encouraging comment, letter or phone call from an anonymous émigré, it reminded me that I was not alone, others were suffering a lot more and I had to keep writing.

My blog was a single candle. Soon, I found other candles like WetBankGuide, GulfSails and Gentilly Girl and the shining beacon that is Think New Orleans, which shares a lot of my own standards on knowledge work, information, content, archival and sharing. The fire caught from there. Writing about New Orleans over and above their jobs, not as their jobs - the woes, the recovery, the administrative blunders from the federal government on down and our own exploration of identity and the nature of self in a city hit by an unnatural disaster - all of the NOLA blogs linked to from my site share that conscience and that personal touch. A greater free, searchable, linked repository of news, data, research and a somewhat coherent set of thoughts on the re-discovery of ourselves.

She went on to offer this very sweet shout-out:

It was also through this blog that I found Sepia Mutiny, the vibrant and thoughtful salve to that within me which is Indian, Kuwaiti, American and everything in between.

Maitri, the honor is ours, and we are thrilled that you will be sharing for the next month, at this of all times, your perspectives with Sepia Mutiny readers.

Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from New Orleans, Louisiana, put your hands together and make some noise for one strong sister, Maitri Venkat-Ramani.

Aaaaaand I'm back! What, you thought they could keep me away from the bunker forever?

It has been a few months since my gig as Mutiny-Wallah has been up, and I have since been in the real world sitting at cubicles writing humdrum policy reports, all the while dreaming of the happy days with the monkeys in the Sepia Mutiny bunker. Boy, did I miss those monkeys.Boy, did I miss those monkeys. When to my surprise, a couple of nights ago while planning my revolution, I was suddenly blindfolded and kidnapped. I was whisked away from Los Angeles on an autorickshaw (we were supposed to fly Jet Blue, but you know...) and when the blindfold was taken off a couple of hours ago, I found myself once again in the Sepia Mutiny bunkers. Yay!

How long will I be a mutiny-wallah this time around? They keep things hushed around me, but rumor has it it will last through November 7th. That is right, Election Day. You see kids, for those of you living under rocks, or not in this nation, we are at the beginning of a heightened election season, for the midterm elections. Here at Sepia, we've already brought you an interview with Raj Bakhta and of course, there was the whole Macaca Mutiny. In anticipation for the upcoming stories surrounding the 2006 elections, I have been brought on to assist you on this path. Think of me as the desi George Stephanopoulos, or the Anderson Cooper of the mutiny. I plan on bringing you investigative Election 2006 coverage, hard hitting interviews with political candidates, and keep you educated with the latest issues that will help in casting your ballot on November 7th. Of course, knowing the work that I love to do, you didn't think you'd get away without a little voter registration, voter education and get-out-the vote, did you?

This is my 9th year working an election, and I know that there must be plenty of you out there working it too. Are you a desi running for office? Let me know. Registering voters? Campaigning on a ballot initiative? Writing a report about the South Asian Vote? Need to know where to register, where your poll is? Let me help and be devoted to getting you the best South Asian American blog Election 2006 coverage. And now, let the real mutiny begin- again.

I thought I’d take a moment to lay out for our readers how individual action in the context of a community CAN help change the status quo, particularly when it comes to political power and representation in the U.S. Here is step-by-step look at the BIG PICTURE.

1) First, let me take you back to July 31st (just two weeks ago) when Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. released its poll regarding the Virgina Senate race:

U.S. Sen. George Allen leads Jim Webb for re-election but may be threatened by voter distaste for the Iraq war and President Bush, according to The Times-Dispatch Poll.

Popular and well-known, the Republican senator is favored for a second term by 48 percent, while Democrat Webb, still struggling to get out his name and message, is backed by 32 per cent. Twenty percent are undecided.

That the support for Allen, the state’s dominant Republican for more than a decade, is under 50 percent suggests he is handicapped by anti-GOP sentiment, much of it attributed to uncertainty over Iraq…

As an early snapshot of a race that could help decide control of the Senate, the poll suggests Allen is using the advantages of incumbency, including a huge edge in fundraising, to navigate potential hazards. [Link]

2) When that first domino fell, the Democratic leadership decided to strategically cut their losses and run. They wrote off both Webb and Virgina:

To hear national Democratic party leaders tell it, Democrat James Webb has a solid chance of ousting Republican Sen. George Allen this fall.

“You might find Cinderella in Virginia,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., told Congressional Quarterly this spring. “Allen’s numbers are not very strong.”

But in the first major spending decision of the fall campaign, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee - which Schumer heads - took a pass on Virginia.

The committee, which helps elect Democratic senators, has reserved a reported $25 million worth of television ads in states where Republican incumbents are considered vulnerable. Virginia is not one of them.

The spending plan, first reported by The Associated Press, came within days of a Mason-Dixon poll showing Allen leading Webb by 16 percentage points. [Link]

Oy, it is already Tuesday the 8th, which means that the NYCSM meetup is merely days away. There is much to plot and despite what a few of you have commented to me privately, I do NOT think that whatever we have come up with thus far is either “complicated” or, ahem, “a mess”. ;) Really, since those of you who raised such concerns are NEW YORKERS, if you would like to throw in your randa paise, FEEL FREE. It’s your time to shine.

To refresh your drinks memories, the meetup is occurring this Sunday because Talvin Singh, Asha Puthli and a few other amazing types are performing for FREE at Summerstage, in Central Park. The show is from 3-7pm but “doors” open at 1:30; that is when a few hyper-dedicated souls have offered to mark our territory stake out a prime spot in the shade, slightly away from all the craziness. I would just like to state here that as a quondam sunbather (UC Davis quad…holla if ya hear me), I am abiding by this arrangement because I want to hang out with as many of you as possible; I am in no way buying in to Ignorant Auntie and Cruel Auntie’s bakwas about how if I let myself get a tenth-of-a-shade-darker, no boy will EVER look my way and I will die alone, my corpse half-devoured by wild dogs (yes, that last bit is from a much-loved film…but sadly, S + C Auntie are NOT similarly fictional). I reject all of this colorist stupidity. ;) However, I wholly support a pleasant day spent getting faded in mutinous company.

Here is what we need to know, somewhat urgently:

• WHO is coming on Sunday? This directly affects…
• WHAT to bring, as well as how much of it.

Once we sort all of that out, memorize this: sadly, we have decided NOT to rendezvous at the bar around two. Instead, please meet us at 1:30pm at the park entrance at 72nd and 5th. The sooner you arrive, the sooner we can meander over to one hell of a picnic. Throwing the keys to Lil Cease is probably not necessary since they won’t allow us to bring alchohol to this event.

Joan, Zimbly, Pooja and I are all going to be there, as far as I know. I have linked to our pictures, so if you get there late, peer at all the Summerstage fans anxiously until you locate us (or our doppelgangers). Alternatively, just listen for the loudest, most obnoxious group possible and follow the sounds of laughter and screaming (not that I am in ANY way endorsing ice fights or similarly immature lunacy).

Do you have any other comments or questions? That is just what the thread below is for—- NYC meetup-related shtuff.

p.s. You DCers and EssEffites will each get your own posts in the next few days, that way we can keep this, um, organized (as if such things are possible with the brown). Now who is in and what are you packing in your “dry” pick-a-nick baskets?

A few days ago I quipped to my fellow bloggers that Sepia Mutiny has now lasted significantly longer than my longest relationship. I like to think it is because I only invest my time in fruitful causes . Therefore, I may as well romance you guys. First some mood music. I was just going to quote some lines from the most appropriate song but Siddhartha found the video for it on YouTube:

I’m actually going to keep this entry short because I am sure one or two of the other bloggers will also write a post about their perspective on our second anniversary (which is tomorrow). On the internet things live and die pretty fast. I wasn’t sure if we’d last this long and we still have a ways to go to get to where some of us want to see the mutiny heading. Especially with elections coming up all of us are trying to make sure we keep a good balance between having fun and serving a purpose with what we write here. We are also trying to keep a good balance between being awake and needing to sleep (and not getting fired from our jobs or flunked out of graduate school).

What I wanted to do is to just say thank you all for this relationship. Because of this blog I have met people that my life would have been poorer without. I say that as both a reader and as a blogger. Maybe some of you can say the same. I hope you guys stick with us for at least another year and maybe its time some of you lurkers de-lurk.

On behalf of the bloggers, the intern, and the monkeys in our basement, Happy Anniversary.

For those of you feeling nostalgic here is the archive from August 2004.

I’ve been a bit busy, so I haven’t been able to ask you about SM Meetups, but I promise I’ve wanted to do so for several weeks. Those mutinous, offline melas are very much on my mind these days, as I contemplate the end of summer and where I will spend it. You see, not only do I think it’s high time for the second-ever live mutiny in DC, it seems that excessively homesick-me will be in the golden state for much of early September (w00t Northern California!!!). I think it’s time to overwhelm Greco once again; let’s take that possibility from tentative to definite, shall we? Let’s also hope the wifi works this time, as it usually does. ;)

Amardeep inspired me (yet again) to post once he issued his gentle invitation to Philadelphia-area readers to join him for that city’s first meetup, before a very cool-sounding concert he just blogged about. Even if you don’t take him up on his tempting offer, I want you to know that it won’t be an anomalous event— Philadelphia is a great city and I’d love to hold regular meetups there, as well as NY and SF. What say all of you, and when I type that I mean ALL of you, wherever you are. Depending on how much demand and notice we get, we may be able to coordinate sepia soirees elsewhere, since many of us travel, some of us, far too much. :D

DC: When should We Chocolate City mutineers will have our next carb-laden, veg-friendly fiesta on August 19th? August 26th. Who knows, if we don’t tell Abhi, we might be able to facilitate a “Yo Dad” appearance which ISN’T moderated! Imagine the possibilities for information-gathering!

SF: What about you, oh citizens of Baghdad-by-the-bay? How many of you will be around for Labor day weekend? I was assuming your answers would be a sea of “not me”s, so I was tentatively glancing at September 9. Thoughts?

Finally, as for you New Yorkers, any weekend you want to shriek and giggle until the Manager yells at us (cough LaLanterna cough) is fine with me. ;)

:+:

Update #1: The people have spoken. DC’s meetup will be on August 26th. :)

:+:

Update # 2: NYC’s loveliest saves the date and suggests something fantastic to meet up for— SummerStage at Central Park with a whole lotta brown choons. Pack your pick-a-nick baskets for Yogi and Booboo to plunder; New York’s meetup will be on August 13th!

Love posting stories on the News tab? But hate copying-pasting multiple times? Well, I have something for you!

There is a new "bookmarklet" for the news tab. Look under the “Post story” link. Just drag that link to your bookmarks/favorites toolbar, and next time whenever you are reading a news story that you want to post on the news tab, just select the summary and click "Enlighten the Mutiny" on your bookmarks/favorites toolbar. Two clicks and be done! It's that simple!

How to add this bookmarklet to Firefox:

1. Make sure your Bookmarks toolbar is visible (View menu > Toolbars > Bookmarks toolbar)
2. Drag "Enlighten the Mutiny" link from the news tab to your Bookmarks toolbar.
3. Goto to a story you want to tell the Mutiny about.
4. Select a summary from that story.
5. Hit "Enlighten the Mutiny" on the bookmarks toolbar, and then hit Post!
6. All done!

How to add this bookmarklet to Internet Explorer:

1. Make sure that View menu > Toolbars > Links is checked
2. Right click on "Enlighten the Mutiny" link on the news tab and select "Add to Favorites"
3. Depending on your security settings, Internet Explorer may complain that it may be unsafe, ignore it, click yes.
4. Click "Create In", if its not already open. Select the Links folder. Click Ok.
5. Goto to a story you want to tell the Mutiny about.
6. Select a summary from that story.
7. Hit "Enlighten the Mutiny" on the Links toolbar, and then hit Post!
8. All done!

This bookmarklet should work in all major browsers, including Opera and Safari. If you have any problems using this feature, just post a comment below.

The Indian Government’s recently imposed ban on all Typepad and Blogspot blogs will soon be over and may already be over in some places. Earlier today, Rediff reported:

The blocking of blogs hosted by sites such as Blogspot, Typepad and Yahoo! Geocities by Internet Service Providers is likely to be lifted within 48 hours. [Link]

In fact, both the government and the ISP umbrella group are claiming that they never planned a blanket ban in the first place, they just wanted to ban 17 blogs:

Amitabh Singhal, a spokesperson of the Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) … said … some ISPs — he insisted it wasn’t all — mistook the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) notice and blocked entire blog domains, adding that it was technically feasible to block a sub-domain and leave others still accessible. [Link]

According to an email sent to SAJA by the Deputy Counsul General in New York, the ban was imposed because:

A two-page write up containing extremely derogatory references to Islam and the holy prophet which had the potential to inflame religious sensitivities in India and create serious law and order problems in the country appeared in a blog facilitated by well-known search engines

However, here’s the actual list of blogs that the government was trying to block. I’ve just skimmed them, but I can’t see the “two page write up” that they’re referring to [a copy of the original order is below the fold]:

1. www.hinduunity.org
2. mypetjawa.mu.nu [American right-wing blog]
3. pajamaeditors.blogspot.com [American right-wing blog]
4. exposingtheleft.blogspot.com [American right-wing blog]
5. thepiratescove.us [American right-wing blog]
6. commonfolkcommonsense.blogspot.com [This is isn’t even in English!]
7. bamapachyderm.com [American right-wing blog]
8. princesskimberley.blogspot.com [Long defunct]
9. merrimusings.typepad.com [Defunct American right-wing blog, but now at http://www.merrimusings.mu.nu ]
10. mackers-world.com [American right-wing blog]
11. www.dalistan.org [They actually mean www.dalitstan.org which is currently down]
12. www.hinduhumanrights.org/hindufocus.html
13. www.nndh.com [Dead URL]
14. bloodroyaltriped.com [Dead URL]
15. imagesearchyahoo.com [Dead URL, but it wouldn’t be a blog!]
16. www.imamali8.com [They probably mean imamali.com but somebody mistyped]
17. www.rahulyadav.com [Computer geek at IU Bloomington - not a blog at all - banned merely for his links to the BJP, RSS, etc]

A few of the blogs mentioned do have some very offensive photos of the Koran, but that’s not the offense that the government was using to justify its ban. Seven of the seventeen blogs are right wing blogs that are strongly anti-Islamic in that LGF-clone way, but again, the government didn’t announce that it was trying to ban all blogs that were harshly critical of Islam. Most importantly, none of them are linked to recent terrorist attacks at all !

So even if you think that censorship should sometimes be imposed by the government, and you accept the government’s reasoning that this “two page write up” is one of those things that should be censored, you’d still be hard pressed to justify this ban.

It was my intention to go out in Style&Snark, involving some kind of LiveBloggingEvent or Recap of Priya&Divya’s Super Sweet 16. But in light of Tuesday’s gripping events on a subcontinent where the Innocent&Hardworking cram 15-per-square meter traveling to and from work in order to put food on the table in the pursuit of better tomorrows, the trivial voyeuristic judgment of affluent, ill-mannered, hyphenated-American teenagers and the parents who indulge them suddenly seemed all the more irrelevant.

In my Sepia denouement, it seemed appropriate to disclose one small confession: I’m scared of Indians. Like, terrified. Like, if everyone in the last comment thread was standing together in a room, it would take me several cocktails to muster the courage to enter. And one of those cocktails would probably have to include some ratio of 151.

Seriously.

Well, my blogging time at Sepia Mutiny has come to an end, and it was both entertaining and challenging. I was first approached by the Bloggers-That-Be at SM after my little rant about the other Viswanathan girl, Kaavya. Soon after the plagiarism scandal of How Opal Mehta Blah B Blah hit, I set up a news alert to figure out if there was a story there. Most of the Kaavya V. news alerts were from Indian newspapers, who seemed to be taking this much harder than the American publishing industry. It has even prompted an intelligent if slightly endless letter from desi author Tanuja Desai Hidier, who criticized the idea there’s only on way to talk about the desi experience. You can read her letter here.

One might ask why Hidier feels the need to comment. My guess is that she feels she doesn’t have any choice. I have just signed with an agent for my latest book, a pop history of wicked women, and she has already made one thing clear to me: I am the “Other Viswanathan” in publishing, not Kaavya. For better or worse, she has made her mark, and the rest of us desi authors—even those without her last name—are following her checkered trail.

“Yo Dad” informs me that the local free paper in the D.C. suburb where he lives has been advertising a new beverage called Café Sepia.

Experience the finest in coffee with ITO EN’s new CAFÉ SEPIA (TM). Each ready-to-drink coffee delivers an artful balance of aroma, body and flavor. Our beans are specially selected for their unmistakable character…to create a truly exceptional coffee encounter. [Link]

I wish we had thought of this first. It would have solved our funding problems. My mom says we should sue them. The question is, “is it any good?” I hate the taste of coffee so I am going to rely on the blog Air Massive to give us a review:

We’re sad to report that Café Sepia tasted weak. It was too watery and diluted than we like. In fact, it lacked the coffee punch of even most established major brands of Japanese can coffee. (Personally, the Boss brand is our gold standard in this East Asian drinks sub-genre.) Café Sepia didn’t taste “bad,” mind you. It was actually pleasant to the tongue. But we expect more — much more — from anything that a drinks maker dares call coffee. [Link]

Thank you again to everyone that donated cash over the last 36 hours to keep this blog running for the next year and to allow us to make some cool new improvements. I just want to give you all a big sloppy hug. We are taking the thermometer and the Paypal link down for now. Counting the people who had asked to mail in checks, we will make our $1000 goal for the year Whether you sent in $1 or a $100 we appreciate your contribution and will try and live up to the high expectations.

Despite the fact that even the smallest of donations means a lot to us, we wanted to single out the following people for going well beyond the call of duty in the amount they were able to donate this time around:

1) Brimful- Given her donation this year and last year she would own a substantial amount of stock in SM if we went public.

2) Seema K.- A dedicated reader and tipster from the East Coast. You rock.

3) DesiDudeinAustin/Gotham- He will be co-hosting the first Texas meet-up with me in a few months.

4) Yo Dad- I promise to mow the lawn next time I’m at home.

5) Vijay C.- We appreciate the love.

6) My attorney in Chicago- You know how I’m going to thank you.

7) VMN Rao- Drinks are on me this weekend.

8) Mahesh G.- Much thanks and please come to a meet-up if you can.

9) Our favorite Canadian (a.k.a. Neha)- We are giving you a second monkey and making you the SM colonial governor of the territories of Canada.

Now, ideally I would post all your names as gratitude but I know that some of you want to keep your privacy. Please try and make it to a meet-up so that we can thank you properly and feel free to email us with any suggestions for improving the site (we might already be working on your idea ;).

And now we return you to your regularly scheduled Mutiny.

Dear SM Readers,

It is time once again for us bloggers at Sepia Mutiny to extend our empty cups and ask for donations to keep this website running. Remember, every time you visit our site it costs us money. We have recently purchased a dedicated server because we plan on greatly expanding our services. Just be patient a while longer and we will start to slowly roll out new features one at a time. The master plan is top secret right now but has been codenamed Operation Sepia Utopia.

Much like NPR and PBS hold an annual pledge drive, we are asking you to donate whatever you can via our Paypal link. If you don’t want to use Paypal but rather mail in a check then contact us for a mailing address. Donations will keep our website ad-free and distraction-free. The thermometer on the sidebar will disappear once we have met our goal of a $1000 for the next year of service. If enough of you give just a few dollars we might be able to meet our goal in under a week. Thanks in advance everyone! As you can see in the pictures below, we have a lot of supporters rooting for us.

The first Indian Mutiny was organized by spreading a coded message with the help of a lotus. But for this mutiny, you don’t need any lotus flowers. An email will suffice!

Yes, now you can email a post from Sepiamutiny to anyone you want! Just click on the “Email post” link under each post.

Go ahead, spread the mutiny!!

…and we’re back! You’re reading this now and so you’ve made it over to our new home.

Welcome to the new and improved Mutiny. If everything looks exactly as it did before, then we’ve done our jobs well.

While the other Mutineers are busy fighting over bathrooms and the most luxuriously appointed living quarters, Kunjan and I will be napping blissfully in our king-size master suites (having arrived first, we naturally staked out the prime real estate in advance).

Thanks for your patience during this transition and please let us know if you notice anything strange.

If there’s one thing we here at the Mutiny have learned from our peers, it’s how to roll in style. After all, what’s the point of being a super-secret group of revolutionaries, if you don’t take full advantage of the perks. So while our tendencies still most definitely gravitate towards Cristal and Beluga, the truth of the matter is that recent growth has left more than a little to be desired in our present diggs.

A stagnant mutiny is a dead mutiny, and so it is that we are moving on to a bigger, phatter and more secure crib… still, of course, somewhere deep in the heart of North Dakota. We’ve been busy packing, the monkeys are ready, and tonight, at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, Sepia… (eh, sorry.. got a little carried away there).

We will be transitioning to a new server tonight at midnight (Tuesday, 12:00AM EST) and depending on where on the internet you call home, the changes could take as long as 24 hours or more to take effect, but for the majority of you, things should be back to normal by the time you get to work on Tuesday morning. In the meantime, you will see a read-only version of the site with comments turned off.

Rest assured, the Mutiny will be back, stronger than ever… plus, we’ve just now learned that the North Dakota historical society has designated our current home a state monument which will be open to visitors beginning next month.

And when, late on a weeknight, you are wakened by short, meaningful raps at the door and open it to find Anna in a hooded, velveteen robe, eyes dark and mysterious, blindfold in hand: you know your time has come and you follow without question.

She picks up your laptop and waits for you at the door, reminding you not to leave home without ample snark, a few good literary jabs and shimmery, sparkling eye makeup.

Your heart races. You swallow down parental warnings to avoid using fuck as a verb, drinking homemade punch out of crystal goblets handed to you by good-for-nothing “bois” and bringing sepia-colored Shame on the family.

You are sweaty-palmed and slightly nauseous over urban legends about hazing, mutinous readers and the potential for an unruly comment thread to turn into an impromptu session of Circle the Fat.

But mostly, you feel jittery and excited. Hoping against hope as she blindfolds you, that when the cool, silky fabric is ultimately removed you’ll find yourself at the intersection of Good Storytelling, Meaningful Prose and Cultural Context, but that until it is you have to go out on faith, friendship and sisterhood because you won’t know for sure till you get there what’s in store for you down the road ahead.

One of the things which fascinates me about this community of blogginess we inhabit is the randomness of connections and the chain of events which must transpire in order for someone to find blog X. Those of you who know me in real life know that this is a question I always pose, because before SM, I always wondered, “How on earth did you know I was alive?” The vast majority of the answers I’ve received boil down to three syllables: Manish Vij.

My FAVORITE new (to me) blog of the past year belongs to a fellow DCist and I would like to thank erstwhile SM regular and current legal eagle Maisnon for indirectly introducing me to one insightful and addictive personality: The Barmaid. I can’t imagine my life without one. ;) She’s half-woman, half-amazing. Finding her exceptionally well-written blog resulted in one of the rarest activities I might choose to do: reading an entire archive. To get all power chord-y Aerosmith on your kundis, I didn’t want to miss a thing. I think we can all agree that when you’ve forsaken all others and forgotten what it was that you were supposed to do because you are voraciously consuming someone’s back catalog, that’s a sign that you’ve stumbled on to one hell of a blog.

Perhaps it would be easiest if I counted down the reasons why the most talented blogtender ever makes me reconsider my addiction to NYC (Yes. She single-handedly puts all the hotness in swamp city. And if you don’t know, now you know):

10) She was a Theta, so she gets this DG’s reliance on Greek speak (I almost rushed that house, so good taste on her). She’s like the grand-little I forever wanted and never had.

9) She, too, adores Amma. Respect her authority as she taxes the Dahi Vada before leaving for the Mysore Masala Dosa. Then fall a little bit in lurve as she matches you, cup for cup of Madras Coffee, at a Saturday morning brunch which is the closest I’ve ever come to those unrealistic-to-me morning-ish meals which went down on every ep of Sex and The City.

8) She appreciates my powerful love for the wackiest news show on television: World News Now. Hail its wonderful weirdness with me even if its most recent source of brownitude is no longer holding court.

7) Malayalees do it better. ;)

6) Her drink specials are so tasty, intoxication occurs quickly and inevitably. Yet…there’s never a hangover.

5) If you end up at Sephora with her, she will exhibit no hesitation or self-consciousness when it comes to testing out vivid metallic Chanel lipsticks or four varieties of bronzer/glitter. She will also loyally assist you with shooting stink-eye at those useless @$$h073$ at MAC. Hisssss.

4) She is wise enough to use TYPEPAD, like someone else we know. ;)

3) Her inclusion of her soon-to-be-as-legendary-as-Yo-Dad parents, “Lester” and “Sally” in her blogging life is inspiring, heartwarming and fodder for some of the most exquisitely priceless, “OMG, me too!” or “Omg, I wish.”-moments I’ve had this year.

2) Remember that personal bravery she displayed at Sephora? She’s just like that online, dissecting heartbreak, regret and lessons learned with a selfless candor which makes you want to hug her and thank her. Repeatedly.

1) She is hysterical. Witty. Rare. Consistently awesome. In short: perfection.

Kindly welcome the latest knockout to grace our bunker as a cherished guest: The Barmaid. If you are mean to her, I will cut you, like any good Akka/Chechi would. I can’t for the life of me see why I would need to do that, though. I predict you’ll end up just as enchanted as the rest of us.

The past month or so has taught me that there are a lot of people out there that want to see this blog, and what it is all about, succeed. The emails we recently received offering technical support, as well as the offers of financial support we have gotten, have led me to conclude something similar to what one forward looking American politician once said. To paraphrase:

“We’ve earned capital in this blogosphere, blog capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.”

So with that I am announcing the creation of The Desi Dad Project.

For the past six months I have been mulling this idea over in my head. Photographs, even without any words or explanations, can convey a tremendous amount of information and history. Just look through these pictures of some of the first Indian Americans that came to the U.S in the early 20th century, most of them Sikh Punjabis. Recently, with the immigration debate in this country raging on, we have discussed the signifigance of the 1965 Immigration Act and how many of our fathers immigrated to the U.S. as a result of this act. Eventually this led to many of our births. :)

So this is what I am proposing, particularly in light of Father’s Day which is just two weeks away. I want you guys to upload a single picture of your dad. I want a photographic archive that captures the spirit of what it meant to be an immigrant in this country as part of the second wave. I want to capture that part of our collective history before it rots away in old albums in our basements, attics, and closets. This project won’t end with Father’s Day though but will keep accepting phtographs.

Here are the criteria you must meet before uploading a picture of your father into this new archive I am proposing:

• Your father immigrated to the United States between 1965 and 1985. If he arrived a couple of years before 1965 it is okay, but please do not upload pictures taken after 1985. I am looking for pictures that capture the experience of a SPECIFIC generation for the purposes of this project.
• Your father came from a country in South Asia (e.g. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, etc.) or from ANY other country so long as his ethnicity can be traced back to a South Asian country.
• The picture you upload has to have been snapped in America.
• I strongly prefer that your father should be the only person visible in the photograph (feel free to crop the original picture). Pictures of individuals tell a different story than pictures of families. If you don’t have ANY pictures of you father alone then maybe you have one with the two of you together.

Batman has Alfred Pennyworth. James Bond has Q. Jack Bauer has Chloe O’Brian. Sidney Bristow has Marshall Flinkman.

…and now Sepia Mutiny has Kunjan Shah and Paul Singh.

We put out a call for help recently so that SM could continue to grow and improve. Many of you answered our call and we thank you ALL sincerely. We have decided to add two people to help with site administration and also to help improve this blog with lots of new features over time. Like Lexus, we here at SM are in the relentless pursuit of perfection. So far we have been handing out the equivalent of blog cocaine. Soon we will flood the blogosphere with blog crack.

Kunjan is only 22 and lives in Kansas City. We needed some young blood in our North Dakota bunker. Everyone around here has been going around using the phrase “when I was young,” way too often. We knew things had to change. Around the bunker we refer to Kunjan by his codename: The Keymaster.

Paul is a bit of a mystery. He is currently in New York although seems to be a Californian originally. We picked Paul for his years of experience and also his great aesthetic sense. We want to give SM a bit of a makeover and he seems to be the right person for the job. Around the bunker we refer to Paul by his codename: The Gatekeeper.

Please join me in welcoming Kunjan and Paul.

We are also in the process of moving our site to a new dedicated server. SM reader Krishnan has been instrumental in helping us secure the new server and we would really like to convey our thanks to him for all the time that he has put into it so far.

Because so many readers have offered to help and seem so capable, we are going to try and create a space in the near future whereby readers can offer technical suggestions to help improve the site. Think of it as open-sourcing. Right now we use Moveable Type but we may eventually switch to Wordpress. For those of you who have offered your help, look for a post about this within the next month or two and we may contact some of you by email.

Somebody told me that this blogosphere was small
we use to live in the same city, go to the same high school
and never met before
until I’m blogging on Sepia Mutiny
and peep this Indian queen from NYC
writing on her blog
while she’s practicing street law,
said she workin’ on a post and
could my click check her out,
she said she loved my posts from near Fargo
and that Kaavya sucks,
and now she’s stepping on this stage
to take a piece of our hearts…

My deepest apologies to both our readers and to The Roots. Sometimes I forget that I’m just a blogger and nothing more.

Our newest guest blogger is a lawyer, a blogger, and a published author, BUT NOT related to the disgraced chick-lit author. She’s the real deal. It turns out that we went to the same elementary, middle, and high school at the same time but have never met. Crazy.

But what really “got me” was this entry. Sublime. Please help me welcome Neeraja.

Dear Readers,

For those of us that started Sepia Mutiny it has always been a labor of love. As most of you probably know THIS is not what any of us do full-time (although it may often seem like it). I am writing my Ph.D. dissertation right now and only get about 6 hours of sleep a night, Anna has a new demanding job, Vinod is on almost constant travel, Sajit just got married, and Ennis, Amardeep, Sidd, and Fofatlal are very busy as well. With Manish moving on to pursue other endeavours we are asking readers for help in keeping Sepia Mutiny going. Manish was not only a prolific blogger but also the person behind the technology that created this website. We need help now that he is gone. We are reaching out to our readers to recruit a few of you to join us in our North Dakota Bunker. You don’t have to be a blogger to be a Mutineer. This is what we need ASAP:

1. Somebody who is very skilled in Moveable Type and PHP. Manish was the best at this but if you think you are pretty competent then he will be able to go over our site’s infrastructure with you so that at least you can understand most of it and take over his duties of site administration. Ideally we would like not only someone who can understand most of the current code, but also someone with ideas of their own. This includes technical improvements (e.g. the latest web technology trends like Digg) that can be incorporated into this site. We are looking for someone who has good ideas and a vision for improving Sepia Mutiny. Ideally this person would be based in North America because it makes communication times easier (which is very important for this particular task).
2. Our hosting costs are getting too expensive. Please remember that we don’t have any annoying ads with which to generate revenue. We pay for the site with reader donations, selling t-shirts, and Amazon affiliate fees (if you buy a book off of Amazon by following a link within a post we get a small commission). Every time you visit our site it costs money. For the techies: Right now we use ~202 GB bandwidth a month. We need to upgrade to about 400 GB a month but that would cost us ~$300 a month with our current service provider. We just can’t afford that. Is there anyone out there who is a fan/dedicated reader of SM who can host us for free or knows someone who can (a reputable and reliable provider of course)? Please contact us if you can help out. If we don’t find a solution then we will probably have to implement some sort of ads for revenue.
3. It is time to upgrade our website’s design. We want a sleek, sexy, creative new look without sacrificing page load time. If you are talented web designer and would like to donate your time and skills to the Mutiny then we have a set of bunker keys for you. Email us a web portfolio.

For numbers one and three above you will be putting in a lot of time and effort for no pay. You will however be a part of something that you hopefully love. You will also be able to display your skills and put your face and business logo up on our site (in a manner similar to the RocketPost logo you see on the right-hand sidebar.)

Please use the “Contact us” link at the top of the right-hand column if you can help out with any of these three.

Lastly, please bear with us for the next month or two. We have a virtual “Sorry for the Inconvenience Caused by Renovations” sign up. Thanks again everyone for your support of SM.

Rumor has it that the most mysterious mutineer of them all (hint: it sure as hell ain’t ME) might be in Manhattan on May 28th…so maybe we should have a mini-meetup? Maybe I should overcome my Malayalee proclivity to massacre sentences via massive amounts of alliteration.

Maybe.

I know everyone who LIVES in New York City will leave town, but that just means that this post is dedicated to those mutineers who, like me, will be visiting the area for the holiday weekend; I’ll be in Lawn Guy Land for a wedding on Friday and Saturday. I know I’m not the only one who’ll be there, if only because this wedding has 800 guests.

Anyway, I’m happy to postpone my return trip to DC on Sunday from lunch-ish to something a little later on, if there’s good reason to and I can’t think of better reasons than you.

I shouldn’t say this, but if we do meetup, there’s the possibility of a mutineer mole, i.e. someone who blogs for us but wants to just hang back at his first live SM orgy. So it’s possible that three mutineers will be in Manhattan on May 28th, though considering the moley-moley-mole (Thanks Austin Powers!), maybe it’s more like 2.5. ;)

Comment away if we should seriously consider this. Some of us have Amtrak tickets to book. :D

P.S. That picture is from the September 11, 2005 meetup at the Indian Bread Co.

P.P.S. Yes, we will have another DC meetup shortly. Or longly. Vatewer.

We Sepiaites recently had a facial hair contest down in the North Dakota bunker in honor of our one-year-and nine-month anniversary. Ennis and Amardeep went all uncley (‘you young pups’) and were excluded for obvious reasons. The womyn were granted compassionate dispensation. Vinod dropped out early, muttering something about ‘Malayalee genetics’ and ‘evolution into hairless geniuses.’ The rest of us sported five o’clock shadows by eight o’clock in the morning.

Siddhartha broke down under the strain of the face-off and admitted to having his back waxed this one night in Tijuana. Neha looked ready to leap in with war stories, but something in Anna’s look said ‘unh-unh, don’t go there, girlfriend.’ The legend of Cooch Behar is apparently not, repeat not about royalty.

Finally it was down to Sajit, Abhi, Fofatlal and me. Sajit flexed his square jaw thoughtfully and instantly sprouted whiskers. Abhi downed some freeze-dried astronaut food and grew a Mangal Pandey before our very eyes. Fofatlal misheard the goal of the contest. He had his eyebrows singed off with incense and honey and pranced around yodeling ‘Ya-hoo!’ like Shammi Kapoor.

I, having out-hirsuted the Greeks, out-grown the Sicilians, out-whiskered the Iranis, was now faced with my own private I-da-ho’: geek stubble from the Punjab was beaten by astronaut stubble from Houston. Abhi once bragged:

I haven’t met a person alive that has more lethal stubble than I. Any girl I might date would have friends thinking I was abusing her because her face would be left raw.

Unable to bear the shame, I went down to the SMU, passed out some endangered bananas and whispered a stoic farewell to my fine-furred friends. And then left the bunker for the last time, the pneumatic doors closing in the distance. Unlike Star Trek, they don’t say ‘shhhhhhhh’ when they close, they say ‘Desi please!’ with sass in the neck and quiver in the booty. Goddamn back-talkin’ bunker doors.

As most of you surely know, USA TODAY broke the story yesterday that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been sifting through all of our phone records in order to see if they can establish “patterns” of terrorist activity. This post serves as a follow-up to my post last December.

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews…

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added. [Link]

The ACLU, which defends our civil liberties, was not happy:

“Both the attorney general and the president have lied to the American people about the scope and nature of the NSA’s program,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s clearly not focused on international calls and clearly not just focused on terrorists… . It’s like adding more hay on the haystack to find that one needle.” [Link]

Oh, and by the way, did you guys know:

One government lawyer who has participated in negotiations with telecommunications providers said the Bush administration has argued that a company can turn over its entire database of customer records — and even the stored content of calls and e-mails — because customers “have consented to that” when they establish accounts. The fine print of many telephone and Internet service contracts includes catchall provisions, the lawyer said, authorizing the company to disclose such records to protect public safety or national security, or in compliance with a lawful government request. [Link]

I for one defend President Bush’s data mining program wholeheartedly. A person who cares about and is entrusted to maintain the security and success of ANY institution the way George W. Bush obviously cares for the United States of America, is expected, nay…duty-bound I should say, to keep track of their “organization.” If you guys disagree with this view then you obviously don’t understand the fact that with great power comes great responsibility.

My tremendous sense of responsibility is the very reason that I have been data mining and tapping the telephone calls of my fellow-bloggers here in our North Dakota headquarters for the past two years. Let me tell you a bit of what I’ve learned from this patriotic tool.

To read the latest Sepia Mutiny post on your mobile phone, open this address on your phone’s Web browser:

http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/index.wml

Urban development in North America is easily synonymous with suburbs, highways and cars but cities like New York and Toronto seem to lie a little differently. Their saving grace - as NY to TO import Jane Jacobs (rest in peace) pointed out - is multiplicity. Variance within structures, streets and neighborhoods in a city creates a sense of community and keeps the downtown core from stagnating…and turning into, say, downtown Miami after dark. No offense if you’re repping Miami, love the vibe overall but that core is scary at night, for real!

The debate between strip mall and neighborhood market, in growing cities like Toronto, often turns into an outright cars vs. public transit fist fight. The main point of contention that puts public transit at a loss is money. So it’s about time someone paid heed to successful transit systems in cities where skrilla is not only scarce but is only a portion of the problem. Toronto’s one-stop read for all things concerning public space, Spacing mag, has a new transit issue out and they are beefing it up with special transit-related articles on their site. The first of such articles is a report by Robin Rix on the things Toronto can learn from amchi Mumbai. This piece is 100 % curry free! Oh, wait, there is a cow but it’s…charming:

Can you imagine buying a cup of chai for 11 cents while on your morning commute from Finch to King? Clutching a handrail while sticking your head out of the Lakeshore GO train? Waiting on the Dundas streetcar for a cow to pass? While such occurrences are unimaginable in Toronto, they’re a part of everyday life in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), India. Here in Toronto, we tend to look to such cities as London, New York, or Tokyo when coming up with ideas for improving our own system. But is that necessarily the best approach? If we’re looking for innovation and resourcefulness, wouldn’t we be more likely to find them in cities where they must make do with much less? [Link]

This past week, I flew in and out of NYC for a conference on the civic engagement of immigrant youth, which incidently, also included U.S.-born to immigrant parents. Considering the political climate this month, this roundtable was very interesting to be a part of. Electoral youth organizing is something I’ve been doing for the past 8 years, and working on the civic engagement of desi youth has been my passion for the past few years. In 2004, the youth vote turned out in significant successful numbers, as well as the South/Asian American youth vote.

According to the Youth Vote 2004 Fact Sheet released by CIRCLE, no other age group increased turnout by more than 5 percentage points. The 2004 campaign brought out the largest percentage of young voters in 32 years. Studies suggest that once a young person is involved in the political process, they are more likely to continue to be involved in it. 35.5 percent of 18- to 25-year-old Asian American citizens turned out to vote in 2004, the largest percentage since data started being collected in 1972. [link]

Couple of the big questions asked, and the ones I keep mulling over is, “What is civic engagement? What is political?” Though the traditional ideas are out there of voting and volunteering, there is a whole ‘alternative’ form of civic engagement that youth today take part in.

Back in our grandparents’ generation, being “political” meant you had to go to a rally or a protest, or join a union. Today’s youth has a whole new definition, according to this survey; 22 percent have worn a wristband, 36 percent have signed an online petition, and 30 percent have written an email or letter advocating a position. Eighteen percent have contributed to a political blog. i.e., 918,000 young people are “political bloggers,” which is fascinating since the blogs are a product of only the past few years. 34 percent of [college youth] say they turn to blogs [to get their news].[link]

I’ve been AWOL for the past few days on a big-time mission for Sepia Mutiny. I was tasked by the bunker-mates to try and sign Kaavya Viswanathan to a contract to blog for us here at SM. I even offered her a $500,000 advance and a TWO-month guest slot (as opposed to the standard one month) at our bunker. I know that she has never blogged before and is pretty young, but a team of monkeys in our basement were ready to help in “packaging” her stuff so that it would fit the tone and content of our website. Alas, I just couldn’t close the deal due to some legal issues.

There was no way I was going to come back empty handed however. As a back-up we made an offer to both Amardeep Singh and Siddhartha Mitter. Details of the contract? No advance, no movie deal, no Couric interview. Just disgruntled comment leavers and a shot at fomenting mutiny. They agreed only once we said we’d throw in a hair and make-up person (and put a star on their door). Just to be clear, if they end up plagiarizing we had nothing to do with it.

The Times of India paper edition, while better than its ad-littered Web site, still runs a few howlers:

In this story, Rang De Basanti cutie Soha Ali Khan wears a baby tee with a Lenovo logo next to a story written like ad copy which pimps the latest Thinkpad. This ran last week as straight editorial with no ‘advertisement’ label. And these paid-for stories are apparently common practice (thanks, Amit).

When a student newspaper quotes the ToI, it apparently qualifies as three-column news. Have some freakin’ self-respect. They call themselves the Times of India, not the Times of Podunkville Elementary.

I’ve spent the last five days at the cathedral for Greek Orthodox Easter and as anyone who knows anything about the Orthodox Church is aware, this means that I spent close to twenty hours in a haze of frankincense and liturgical chanting. Sometimes, an hour would pass which didn’t require much participation on my part and my thoughts would predictably wander.

Taz seemed to be a hit with our readers— and that meant that the pressure was on. So, who should our next honored guest blogger be? She should obviously be a she, but which witty woman could we borrow, who could hang with the incorrigible XYs in the bunker, beat them at pool and Xbox AND do it all backwards while in high heels?
The chanting continued and I looked up towards the mosaic-adorned dome. My wish listing continued shamelessly, despite the fact that greed is a sin.

My dream girl would adore Almodovar yet choose to further shrink the pathetic amount of space we provide guest bloggers in their cells by unpacking books she can’t live without, by Rand and Rushdie, no less. (I can see that I’m going to get no rest any time soon, not with having to stand outside her door to keep the Vij and Vinod at bay.) When I ask her why on earth she’d bring thousands of pages to a place where she’d be expected to write feverishly, she’d reply that she couldn’t, nay, wouldn’t be forced to choose just one tome to take with her to the barren land where our bunker lies.

She’d have to be okay with musical snobs who make Pitchfork-ers seem humble; we play a ton of conscious hip-hop, loopy trip hop and even a smattering of pop. If she can stump us by dropping something unfamiliar in the mix, she’ll be golden. What am I typing…she’s my dream girl…she’ll school us mercilessly, probably with something addictive like Spank Rock.

The chanting grew appropriately mournful and so did I. My dream girl was just that, an apparition, an apsara, an absolutely impossible cocktail of coolness. I sighed audibly and the austere yia yia to my left glared at me. Time to focus on gettin’ saved. I had been a bad girl, after all.

Suddenly a light pierced the church, as if heaven itself was opening and I heard what sounded like a celestial chorus of angels in perfect harmony. Eureka. I have found her.

Meetups might just be the most delightfully unexpected dish which is made from all this flavorful brownness (which conveniently is contained in one savory packet). When liveblogging isn’t possible, sometimes the best substitute is looking at all the wacky, joyful pictures which inevitably get captured by the half-dozen or so cameras which tend to be around (80% of which are Canons— you read it here first).

Now that we’ve had several meetups in four Amreekan cities, I just know that there are potentially hundreds of pictures moldering away on your computers, pictures which could find a home in the Flickr group created just for the Mutiny. LA Mutineers, this is a gentle plea to share your pictures with the rest of us via this outlet. If you are already a member of Flickr, you may comment on the 100 photographs which are already up, all from last month’s fantastic DC meetup. If you’re not a member, you can still view all pictures by clicking here.

I PROMISE you’ll want to see what’s hiding after the jump. ;)

Maybe it’s because I live in Los Angeles. But I’ll be the first to admit it. I love celebrity gossip. Imagine my surprise when I heard this report on the news this morning.

Mother Teresa. Totally see the resemblance.

Paris Hilton is on the short-list to play beatified nun Mother Teresa in an upcoming bipoic of the late Nobel Peace Prize winner. Film director T. Rajeevnath said his idea to cast the 25-year-old celebutante after a computer-generated image showed a close facial match between “The Simple Life” simpleton and the Albanian-born holy woman. “(Hilton’s) features resemble Mother Teresa’s,” Rajeevnath said. [link]

Waaaaait a second. Didn’t we just play the ‘who’s famous face matches mine’ game using a computer-generated image facial matching website here on Sepia Mutiny only a few months back?

I’ll just let you know that I ended up at a verrry interesting website, which scanned a picture I uploaded before telling me which celebrity in its database I resembled. See whom YOU don’t look like by going to MyHeritage.com y’self. [link]

I mean, Rajeevnath is Indian. Maybe he reads Sepia Mutiny and maybe, just maybe, that is what compelled him to pick Paris Hilton. That, and this:

But it was when the director read an article in which Hilton said she had turned down the chance to pose nude for Playboy maggie that he believed he had found the woman to emulate Mother Teresa’s good works. Shooting in several countries, including West Bengal will begin early next year.

Proceeds from the film will benefit the Missionaries of Charity.

Missionaries. Paris Hilton. Hmm… I wonder how familiar she is with that line of work…

You know me by now good readers. I am normally not one to do a fluff post here on SM but I feel I must draw your attention to someting sent to me. All bloggers use some service to keep track of who visits their website (how many hits, where are they from, etc.). We swear that we won’t turn over our records to the Bush administration. Many sites, including our own, use Sitemeter. Sitemeter also tells you the search term someone keyed in to a search engine like Google to arrive at a blog. Earlier, blogger Suhail Kazi brought this to my attention. It is a screenshot of the sitemeter keeping track of his blog (see the last line). The internet is apparently buzzing with people desperately looking to substantiate rumors swirling around Manish’s trip to India.

What is Manish really doing in India? Is he keeping his fellow mutineers in the dark? You know me. I’m not one to gossip but I’m just saying…

Amnesty International issued a public statement regarding the death sentence of an Iranian teenager:

On 3 January, 18-year-old Nazanin was sentenced to death for murder by a criminal court, after she reportedly admitted stabbing to death one of three men who attempted to rape her and her 16-year-old niece in a park in Karaj in March 2005. She was seventeen at the time. Her sentence is subject to review by the Court of Appeal, and if upheld, to confirmation by the Supreme Court. According to reports in the Iranian newspaper, E’temaad, Nazanin told the court that three men had approached her and her niece, forced them to the ground and tried to rape them. Seeking to defend her niece and herself, Nazanin stabbed one man in the hand with a knife that she possessed and then, when the men continued to pursue them, stabbed another of the men in the chest. She reportedly told the court “I wanted to defend myself and my niece. I did not want to kill that boy. At the heat of the moment I did not know what to do because no one came to our help”, but was nevertheless sentenced to death. [Link]

The court’s judgment has, to some, further exposed the unfairness of Islamic law with respect to women. As others have pointed out, Nazanin may have been unable to prove that she acted in self-defense because of certain evidentiary rules in Islamic law that place greater weight on the testimony of males.

The women asked, “O Allah’s Apostle! What is deficient in our intelligence and religion?” He said, “Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?” They replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in her intelligence. [Link]

Accordiginly, Nazanin and her niece may have testified that the three men attempted to rape them, but the testimony of the two surviving men would have successfully refuted this claim.

(For those interested, there is an online petition to “save” Nazanin, which will be submitted to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and others.)

The case has also reinvigorated the debate about whether the death penalty should be applied to teenagers (an issue the Supreme Court of the United States recently addressed in Roper v. Simmons), and whether capital punishment should be abolished entirely.

In India, rape is not punishable by death, however some have argued that the availability of capital punishment should extend to rape cases. Columnist Vir Sanghvi, for example, suggested that “rape is as bad as murder,” particularly because of the nature of Indian society:

It is almost impossible to recover and lead a normal life after you have been raped in India. First of all, you probably can’t talk about it. Secondly, in many cases, even when you do complain, no action is taken against the rapist. Thirdly, you are finished on the arranged marriage market and if you’re already married, your husband acts as though you are now shop soiled. And finally, far from being counselled to cope with the trauma of rape, you face a new trauma: society’s hostility. [Link]

Ancestry from a non-India South Asian country? Check, Bangladesh. Woman? Check. Muslim? Check. Gay? Umm, no… but I could be if you want me to be… Cheeky? Check.

Much like that guy on FX that tries out something new for thirty days, these next thirty are devoted to you. You want me to go undercover and get an interview with Sunny Leone, I’ll do it. You want me to sneak stealthily into Abhi’s office and let a bee loose in it, and video his reaction, done. Figure out how to tap into the secret direct line in the ND office that pages Razib-the-Atheist so easily, I’m on it. And just like that other atheist, figure out a creative eBay auctions, such as, say, hours of Vinod in a dress, to funnel traffic to SM- well, I’m so there. Looking for a suitable boy/girl? I’ll match you up. Are you tired of all the Sheetal Sheth pictures and covers of Indian Maxim? Is the post on the hotness of the Bangladeshi blue eyed workers simply not enough? For you, I will fill my posts with as many John Abraham photos as possible. You got questions, I got answers. And if I don’t, I’ll sneak around under the official auspices of Sepia Mutiny Temporary Super Star and get them for you.

Who am I? I’m simply a coffee-colored geeky nerd. Nerding out to be a full on geek- with Desi-American issues being the core of what I work on. In all seriousness, it’s good to see a site that is creating a real community online, connecting and networking desis everywhere. I’m honored to join the roll to the right for the next 30 days, and hope to give it the justice it deserves. And now, let the real mutiny begin…?

I met our next guest blogger, Tanzila Ahmed (founder of South Asian American Voting Youth), under admittedly unfortunate circumstances. Through various back-channels and intelligence assets, I received word that Taz was trying to dig up dirt on…ME (presumably to infiltrate the Mutiny and bring us down). Apparently, some forces out there deemed me to be the weakest link at SM and the one most easily seduced/distracted by the feminine ways (Ha! Feel free to try). Little did Taz know that we had a counter-intelligence operation underway and that she had been under surveillance (e.g. warrantless blog taps) the whole time. We go to great lengths to assure our North Dakota-based hegemony. We’ve been holding Taz in our basement for the past eight months, flashing a series of mutinous images in front of her (our rotating banners). Before you can learn you must first un-learn. We had to be sure that she no longer feared anything. In just the past month a Stockholm-like syndrome set in and she began to come around. She is ready now, and the Mutiny is ready for her…

As some of you have now guessed, we were NOT in fact taken over by the junk peddlers of “Happy Hippie.” Our url is still very much our own. We want to take this opportunity to first thank the dozens who sent us emails of sympathy and offers of help to defend against the scurrilous cyber-squatters who chose the day before April 1st to attack us. Former SM guestblogger Cicatrix wrote to us immediately:

Who the f*ck are those squatters? They’re clearly not out to sell anything, but they’ve put in a lot of thought/effort (to mock either desis or hippies, I can’t tell) for random some web-hostage-takers. It’s like they deliberately hated sepiamutiny or something. I wonder if that idiot sepiahokum person is behind this. good luck, sepia crew. tell us if there’s anything we can do.

Former guestblogger PG wrote to us later in the day:

Hey’all,
Sorry to see you’ve gotten squatted. The “products” — they’re all fake and there are no working links to buy them — are insult to injury. A friend pointed out that according to register.com, you still should have the domain name until August 4, 2006. Could you give me more info on how this happened? I’d like to help if I can. Good luck,

PG

Half the Sins of Mankind & De Novo

In addition, parts of the blogosphere were in shock (and some a bit happy) to see what had become of us (see here, here, here, here, and here).

Also, a special shot-out to the dark one for being such a good sport:

I was going to post something here about how sepiamutiny got hijacked, but i’ve realized i’ve probably once again been caught by their april fool’s joke.
f*ckers :)
p.s.—it is quite amusing when you read the entries for “happy hippie” :)

Let’s not forget to mention the signed petition either.

But…there were also heroes out there today. A diligent few could not be fooled by so simple and pathetic a hoax. One in particular, Kaps of DesiPundit and Sambhar Mafia, took it upon himself to figure out which bloggers had been fooled and then left a comment on each of their websites informing them of the elaborate deception. Folks, I want to humbly submit his name for special recognition during next year’s world-renowned Indibloggies. That kind of devotion to truth and justice in the blogosphere simply MUST be recognized by his peers. It was, dare I say, delightful. :)

Our domain squatter troubles seem to have evaporated. It’s as if millions of mutineers cried out in outrage and were suddenly silenced. Welcome back.

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

Are you ready for this jelly?

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

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

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

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

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

And you? Should we add you to the list?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Vat?”

“Does kundi mean “ass” or “anus”?

Sigh. A deep breath is inhaled.

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

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

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

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

Another sigh is sighed.

“YES.”

“I knew it!”

If you use a blog reader, we now have a subscription feed for the reader-submitted stories on the News tab:

Subscribe

You can use a blog reader to track all the blogs you read automatically and see only the new posts every day. It lets you easily track 50 blogs instead of five:

• Web service: Bloglines, Google Reader, Windows Live
• Windows: RSSOwl, Maxthon, Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 (beta)
• Mac: Safari, NetNewsWire

Related posts: Really Stuck on Shiva

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

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

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

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

Hey y’all,

We’re testing a new feature which lets you post your tips as news stories directly on the site. Click here or on the News tab at the top of the page to try it out.

We’re thinking of this as a place to track media coverage of the sepia revolution beyond what fits on the main page, and faster than we can get to it. For example, there are loads of stories in the MSM this week about Mr. Dubya Goes to Delhi. And there’s lots of ephemera that’s fun to check out, but doesn’t really fit as a full blog post.

While you’re reading, you can help out by flagging reader-submitted stories which are spam, duplicate or just plain lame. Just click the ‘Flag this’ link at the bottom of any story.

This is an experiment, so please have at it!

A few years from now, when posterity comes ambling around, I will be known as the guest blogger at Sepia Mutiny that got away. Got away with not visiting the North Dakota headquarters ever, got away with missing the traumatic initiation party (I definitely didn’t want to be paddled by a guy, even a guy with great hair) that the mutineers reportedly throw and got away with maintaining the laziest guest blogging schedule on Sepia Mutiny ever, because I had Siddhartha to cover for me. Not too lazy though - at this rate I could’ve hit Manish’s weekly post count in just under three years, and that’s way more than most bloggers can claim.

But then, like all good things (please, keep the snickering down, it hurts me when you do that) this little stint must come to an end as well, and I must now go back to my own blog, where the sitemeter stats will be much easier to monitor. Thank God for that.

So here it is: Thank you all for a great time, and good bye.

Manhattan has held three (including the first and last), San Francisco contained two (the best, Jerry…the BEST!), Brooklyn had quite a sweet one…and now FINALLY, the most powerful city on earth will host a Mutinous Meetup on Saturday, March 25th!

To continue with that nascent alliteration, it’s all going down in the month of MARCH, which comes in like a Singh and goes out like some…ghosht. Believe it or not, half-kundi’d me remembered to bring my calendar to my shimmering birthday fete two weeks ago, where our two squeakiest wheels (read: the SM loyalists who wanted a meetup most, who just happened to be my guests that night) provided valuable input with regards to when we should get trashed get together; Kenyandesi and Chai chose the first Saturday in March to mutiny earlier in the month, but at this point, the date you should save is MARCH 25. :)

I already know what our precious unbwogable bachi thinks (that’s her, on the right, in the picture to the left), but what say you Zzzzafar, Msichana, Timepass et al? Does March 4th work for you? Will this be a Tryst with Mutiny? Will my record of hosting the BEST meetups ever extend to the right coast? ;) Will Santino EVER get kicked off Project Runway??? Sorry, I’m watching that show right now. :D

If March 4th 25th is an awful choice, do speak up, though if we choose something different, a certain Space Cowboy might not be able to attend.

As mentioned before, this past weekend I was invited to speak at the South Asian Alliance Network conference at the University of Michigan. The conference organizers, in what MUST have been a drug-induced haze, asked me to give the kickoff address for the day. The speaker’s packet that I was sent contained a brief note about what the kickoff speech should include. Here is an excerpt:

Attendees of my workshop (a.k.a victims)

This is a brief overview of what we would like you to discuss in your kickoff address. Please use your own expertise and background when creating this speech. The goal of this speech is to excite the participants for the upcoming day; the points that follow are simply ideas that are intended to guide your thought process.

• An anecdote to energize/excite participants for the day ahead

• Inspirational quote/saying

Whoa! As you can imagine I was nervous as all hell. I haven’t had to inspire or excite people since…well, ever I guess. The speech went alright however, and I did not trip getting on OR off the stage. I was then going to Live Blog the conference for the consumption of SM readers, but it was so damn engrossing that I kept my laptop in its case, and decided to selfishly attend the workshops instead. My workshop was titled “Get up, get out, and get moving”:

Authors, comedians, lyricists, poets, painters, and sculptors - the list goes on - are all part of the process to develop society. This workshop explores how these individuals find the inspiration to carry out such enormous tasks and whether these professions well-suited to activism. Learn from the very real stories of these accomplished individuals who have a dynamic role in society.

Obviously I fell into “the list goes on” category . It was a good workshop. I miss being an undergrad. These attendees were all smart as hell and a lot more engaged than I remember being. I think I have come to see the University of Michigan as a Utopian bubble where anything is possible, especially if you are a member of the South Asian community. I am going to make a bold (albeit biased) prediction that 20 years from now there will be many South Asian alumni from Michigan that are running this country. To give you an idea of how special this conference was, there was EVEN Ohio State representation.

Hi there!

Fofatlal Popatlal, Esq., at your service

Three days later a strange transformation came over me. From dawn to dusk I had an uncontrollable urge to spew my thoughts about everything: current events, movies, bowel movements. At first I jotted down my thoughts hurriedly in red and blue, but I soon realized that out of one pen flowed only truth and out of the other only lies. In desperation I downed a fifth of Black Label and passed out drooling on my laptop keyboard. When I awoke I found that I had been typing frantically in my sleep. It was all half-baked gibberish which posted itself on the Internets.

You know what happened next. The Mutineers knew I was a perfect fit. I could no longer fluff Salman’s combover between bouts of obsessive blogging, so he fired me over the phone from South America. Padma left him for me because I had bigger glasses and he was too self-effacing.

One day the earth opened up and swallowed her whole. It all came out in the investigation: the mole-men operating the mole-machines drilling the last big tunnel in New York. In a city of fury, the gods must be appeased. The last instant of her life was captured by a photojournalist who happened by, a stricken Medusa-haired goddess teetering on heels, the pavement rent behind her. That photograph is all I have, a sepia-tinted fame, a palimpsest of privacy, her final words my name:

Part of Sepia Mutiny’s hidden agenda (we have never published our actual mission or spoken of the Machiavellian designs that drive us) has been to develop an influential and well placed system of CIs that will help our collective Mutiny to spread in both numbers and power (but especially in power). I have taken the liberty of modifying former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno’s formal definition of a “CI” for those of you unfamiliar with this term:

“Confidential Informant” or “CI” — any individual who provides useful and credible information to a JLEA Sepia Mutiny regarding felonious criminal interesting desi-related activities, and from whom the JLEA Sepia Mutiny expects or intends to obtain additional useful and credible information regarding such activities in the future. [Link]

Basically this means that we want to encourage SM readers to send us the “goods” or the “dirt” on happenings that we don’t yet know about. Want me to give you an example of what kind of CIs that we are seeking out? SM reader Venkat of BTD gives us a heads up about some interesting developments at the Supreme Court. Three of the incoming Supreme Court Clerks are desi:

Scalia: Hashim Mooppan (Harvard ‘05/Luttigator ‘05-‘06)… [Link]

Ginsburg: Arun Subramanian (Columbia ‘04/Jacobs ‘04-‘05/G. Lynch ‘05-‘06) [Link]

Breyer: Thiru Vignarajah (Harvard ‘05/Calabresi) [Link]

These three make ideal CIs. I am reaching out to them. If you know them then forward this on. We can be very discreet. Dead drops could be arranged in random parks by a variety of means. I have had pleasant dealings with clerks from lower federal courts before. Just ask around. We know that in the coming term the Supreme Court will be dealing with many cases involving desis, or with definite importance to the desi community. These three could maybe keep us up to speed on things.

The Drudge Report broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal before major media outlets did. We want SM to break more news also. That is where we need YOU dedicated reader. Are you in a position of power or influence and are just dying to share something you know, or stick it to the man? Do you work for some government agency or powerful corporation that doesn’t appreciate you enough? We appreciate you. Think of me as your very friendly case officer. The agent Vaughn to your agent Bristow. Will some real CIs please stand up?

[Disclaimer: For the record, I am not advocating that you break any laws, at least if they get me in trouble also…or if they get me subpoenaed, because I don’t think I could last in jail very long to protect you as my source. I would really try to though…unless they put me in a cell with some guy named “Tiny” who really isn’t.]

See related posts: The “Devils” Advocates, The Court has Hindu friends, …then you can’t have our money, Orwellian logic

I found our newest guest blogger sitting under a Bodhi Tree in a snow covered park near our world blogging headquarters in North Dakota. For one who had made such a long journey, an invitation to guest blog seemed very appropriate. As I approached him he simply said, “I had been expecting your arrival.” Please welcome one ill Hindu: Siddhartha Mitter.

I am an independent writer on topics including politics, music, food, race, globalization, and cultural change. After academic training in the politics and economics of developing countries, I worked on electric utilities in West Africa, and then spent six years in research and consulting work in the global energy industry. In 2002 I shed these layers to regain my creative freedom. [Link]

Yes, we have found that people who end up in our bunker have shed themselves of material things and chosen to take the blogastic vows that we too hold dear.

One of Sepia Mutiny’s signatures is our revolving banners. Back when Abhi first proposed a desi group blog, we pretty quickly figured out the overall theme on the writing side. But, interestingly enough, the banners took more rounds of discussion, trial & error to nail down — in part cuz too many of us were budding artistes / advertising impressarios but also cuz we recognized that the banners greatly shape the overall emotional tone of the site.

Our / my goal with the banners was sorta summarized in this old email conversation w/ the other proto-mutineers -

The logo needs to be dirt simple, pref monochromatic and scale well w/ size…. my ideal example is the Absolut Vodka bottle. In one of the many posts that went back and forth between me / Kiran & the Absolut Vodka company [re: the] Mulit ad, the Absolut folks said that the key to thier ad campaign was to extend the theme of Absolut as the “universal cultural observer” on behalf of the viewer. The Absolut bottle bonds w/ the ad viewer by showing the viewer an interpretation of an otherwise familiar / interesting scene.

Sepia Mutiny[’s banners] could be the same thing….

How about just locking / loading on a single, stylized font and then printing that font in diff colors across diff desi themed picts?

Now, back in the day, banners were mostly made by SM staff (esp. Manish) although we did have a round of submissions from a few friends of the blog.

Recently, however, we received an extraordinarily beautiful set of banners submitted by Sank of EthnoTechno which totally captured the spirit. As we learned at the NYC meetup, Sank’s a designer by trade and his eye for layout, color, and detail are readily apparent in these images. A few of his submissions are below -

Been WAY too busy to write up detailed notes since the NYC meetup last weekend (since NYC, I’ve been in San Diego, Kansas City, SF and am on my way to Hawaii & Barcelona over the next 2 weeks - work can be a beeyatch sometimes).

Manish trying to hide his obvious jealousy of Anna…

Last Saturday’s NYC meetup was the largest meetup so far (~25ish people over the course of the afternoon) and brought in a lot of new blood, new bloggers, lurkers and almost pulled in a few anonymous patrons at Kati Roll.

The effervescent Jane of All Trades (who, BTW is currently reading one of my recent fav books - David Mccullough’s 1776), posted a good writeup, hints at an interest in a caste-no-bar mutineer 4some & put up handful of her picts.

Our own Suitable Girl blogged, fotolog’ed and flickr’ed the event & some of its aftermath.

Some of the other folks in attendance (reconstructed from my + Manish’s hazy memories of the event… apologies in advance if I missed anyone)-

• Zimblymallu
• Zadeblog
• Nina Paley - who gave us an update on the progress of her Sita odyssey
• commentress Emily
• Jane
• Pooja
• Sank / Ethnotechno
• (anyone else?)

True to form, the Mutiny family continues to amaze and the people at the meetup were each interesting specimens of the desi diaspora. And they certainly have no trouble striking up a boisterous conversation with folks they’ve just met. Some folks were nothing like their blog / comment persona’s. Some were exactly like them. Others were bigger. One thing we all agreed on - while the blogposts brought ‘em in first, it’s obsessive comment checking 15 times a day that really destroys the @work productivity. We heart all the Mutineers.

You know what we don’t have enough of on this blog? Wicked Tamil music videos. Our new guest blogger has written about buying a car:

Lavanya and I enter a car dealership, excited, dreaming shiny new cars - after all, first cars are bought just once. A salesman greets us at the door - a younger, taller Dennis Farina.

“Hi, welcome to our dealership. I am John.” (or Jacob, or some such name)

He then offers his hand to Lavanya.

“Hi John. I am Lavanya.”

” ‘cuse me?”

“Laa-van-yaa”

“Oh, ok.” Turns to me. And duly shakes my hand, almost squishing it. Wincing, I mouth, “Karthik.”

“Sorry?”

“Car - thick, like a car that is fat.”

A little pondering. “Ummm… Can I call you Bob?”

We left.

A quick reminder - the NYC Mutineer Meetup is less than 24 hours away. On tap - 2 blog geeks and a blog diva - Vinod, Manish & Anna (you figure out who’s who) and other mutineers / commentors / readers / lurkers of various stripes.

Where: the new Kati Roll - 140 W 46th b/t 6th & 7th

When: Saturday, Jan 21, 1pm

If precedence holds, Manish & Anna will vie for the honor of live blogging the event while Vinod will vie mightily for even more incriminating picts .

Calling one and all to the first mutineer meetup of ‘06. Turns out that this weekend, we’ve got a triple threat lined up - Anna, Manish & I are all in NYC…

Where - Kati Roll - 140 W 46th between 6th & 7th [Note updated place!]

Lassi opened to some fanfare last April, and NY metro’s Underground Gourmet gave it rather favorable reviews praising it’s nouveau take on classic Indian street food and “inexpensive” prices. Others, including a few mutineers, weren’t entirely happy with the nouveau.

Several readers (particular thanks to NYCDesi, Ace, Sank, Emily, and others) have pointed out that Lassi is probably too small for our plans for world domination. So we’re moving to the new Kati Roll

As usual, given previous meetups, worst case - the food sux but the company will titillate.

As usual, if you can make it, leave a comment or drop us a note so we have some idea of how many folks to expect & how much space to cordon off @ the restaurant.

As you may have heard, last month Bangalore decided to change its name to Bengaluru, a contraction of a Kannada phrase, ‘benda kaal ooru,’ which means ‘city of boiled beans.’

We here at the Mutiny fully support casting off the linguistic corruption of the oppressor. We raise our henna’d fists in solidarity and announce the following:

Sepia Mutiny shall henceforth be known as Faärtinfernø, which means ‘blog of hopeless flames.’

Anyone visiting us in North Dakota must use the new name, or their luggage will wind up lost.

Anyone using the old name will be refused entry into places of worship for being insufficiently brown.

We are spending 900 kajillion dollars to update our signs and stationery. That leaves us nothing to fix our traffic jams, deteriorating infrastructure and inadequate power and bandwidth for our technology operations, but our readers will be happy knowing that we’re spending our time on what really matters.

All blog business will be conducted in our native language: uninformed bloviation, semantic squabbles, unfunny jokes, incomprehensible literary references, tales of virility, meandering personal stories and poli-sci-theory put-downs which nobody gets.

We apologize for this radical change.

To more fully throw off the yoke of the oppressor, every post will be written in our ancient script of Chefspeak.

Yørn desh born, desh born Yørn, børk! børk! børk!

Related post: The tyranny of a transposition typo

But THIS is where it’s at. The SASA conference is being held this weekend in New York. BUT…if you want to go to a conference that you will truly learn from and be inspired by, why non register for the South Asian Awareness Network (SAAN) conference at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor? It will be held on the February 3rd through 6th weekend. If you are a college student in the state of Michigan then you have no excuse. If you are a student in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, or several other close states, then I just have one word for you: ROADTRIP!

SAAN’s primary function is to establish an annual South Asian conference for South Asian and non-South Asian students alike. SAAN 2006: Impact Through Interaction will be the fourth annual holding of this conference, and we hope to continue setting a precedent that all future SAAN conferences will follow.

SAAN’s broad goals include: educating participants and raising awareness about issues affecting South Asians that are often overlooked or not discussed, inspiring young South Asians to become leaders through activism, building pride, unity, and friendship among students in order to promote South Asian awareness, addressing the educational needs and rights of South Asian Americans, maintaining a network of South Asians in Michigan, the Midwest, and across the nation, sponsoring and co-sponsoring programs and events with other South Asian organizations and promoting peace, unity, and tolerance at a young age to South Asians. [Link]

So why am I endorsing THIS conference? Two reasons. First, the South Asian students at the University of Michigan have an unrivaled history of activism. Don’t just take my word for it, ask around. Where do you think the National Gandhi Day of service was started? In addition, back in 1997-1998, students at the University of Michigan began holding conferences (I helped to organize the first one) partly because they were disgusted by the emphasis on partying that conferences like SASA had embraced. These conferences were to focus on REAL activism, and interaction with equally passionate students through plenty of small group interaction. What is the second reason I am endorsing this conference? Well, because they invited me to speak . I am more than a little nervous though. They put me on a panel where the other speaker’s first name is “Preacher.” Who the hell is going to pay ANY attention to what I have to say when the other guy is named “Preacher?!?” Manish suggested I change my name to Abhi X so that I can compete. Here is a partial listing of the speakers (which include a few people we have blogged about) and a listing of the workshops. The panel I am on is titled: Get up, Get Out, and Get Movin’. And yes. If there is Wi-Fi access, I will be live blogging the conference for SM readers. I’d love to sit five feet in front of some of the speakers and type away every time they open their mouths. What?

You can register here for just ~$50.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please join me in welcoming our next guest blogger, PG of Half the Sins and the De Novo group blog. The law groupies here at SM have been atwitter over her smart vivisection of political critters and policy wonkery for some time. From time to time, she also applies her prodigious talents to pawning exotica indien:

I don’t think there will be anything for the next generation of Indian kids to unify around, unless we go through a collective midlife crisis and decide to impose the same expectations on our offspring that our parents put on us.

So far today, I’ve been wished a happy Diwali by a white person and my mom, and my white Property professor was wearing a punjabi dress- style top in class. I was intending to celebrate it properly, but then I realized I was having a bit of iron deficiency, so I ate a hamburger. [Link]

Last night as we were waiting to get into the Lido, a Vegas-style club in Paris’s otherwise elegant Champs Elysees district, I kept pretending that we were going to a strip joint and quoting Chris Rock jokes about how no one would want to eat the food. “Titties and tater tots don’t mix!..”

… then come out the girls with the boobie verison of a punjabi dress/ salwar kameez. By boobie version, I mean that it looked about right, the loose pants and all, except the top didn’t cover their tits. Which was what most of the costumes in this show were like, but you don’t expect to see the same outfit that your mama can wear exposing boobs. That just ain’t right.

But that was only a little appetizer… Shiva with tits was a showgirl wearing a big headdress that looked like the traditional representation of many-armed Shiva, except Shiva doesn’t have tits, on account of Shiva is a MAN.

It wasn’t enough to have Shiva with titties. Nope, then we had to have half a dozen Ganeshas in ass-pants and no shirts. These were the showboys wearing elephant masks, complete with trunk. They came out on a stage set done up to look like a temple. A TEMPLE! Complete with gold paint. They also trotted out a big fake plastic elephant for one of the showgirls to ride…

Did I mention the giant fake lotus blossom that came out of the floor?… [Link]

Welcome, PG!

A ToI reporter showed up to a small Delhi blogger meetup several days ago under an assumed name and did a Page Six/Page 3-style takedown of our very own TTG:

Most mainstream Indian papers are glorified scandal rags.. the active blogging community in India is a shockingly tiny group… Their preoccupation nevertheless continues to be slamming and analysing a very wide variety of things in an attempt to display their intellectual might… Their favourite pastime remains MSM (blog speak for mainstream media) bashing, often without caring to provide substantiations and taking cover behind free speech platitude…

… the 3rd annual Delhi bloggers meet just proved how big (or small) is the Indian blogosphere. Just four bloggers attended it, counting the host… ”I have booked the entire section of the restaurant,” he added, pointing at the empty sofas reserved for an army of bloggers that he had expected…

The Indian blogosphere has a long way to go before it even comes near to achieving the influence of the American bloggers… We are yet to see the Instapundit of India or an Andrew Sullivan. And this is not lost on them. ”We are the elite bloggers of India,” announced Tarun… [Link]

There’s no law against snark, but the aggrieved organizer says the story is full of inaccuracies:

Barista is not a restaurant. I hadn’t booked the “entire section” of it. And there was ONE sofa, which could hold 2 people, and ONE chair that was empty…

I SAID I WASN’T one of the ELITE bloggers of India, and went on to roll off a list of all the A-list dudes…

Now I know how celebrities must feel when they see their quotes in print. Is anything in the paper the truth? [Link]

Well, it seems that my month-long tryst with Mutiny is about to end.  When I first headed up to the North Dakota HQ, I was just a small-town gal with a laptop and a dream of bringing general-interest news stories to the South Asian community.  I leave here with an enhanced appreciation for the bloggers and readers of Sepia Mutiny, and also with scenes of unspeakable North Dakotan depravity seared into my brain. 

Before I turn in my linens and SM-monogrammed guest towels, I just want to thank all you readers for not tearing me to shreds, and for your kind and thought-provoking comments.  And of course, thanks to the Mutineers for being such helpful, hard-working, and gracious hosts.  Finally, thanks to Shakti Kapoor for helping make all of this happen for me. 

See you in the comments section!

You know what makes us Sepia Mutiny Bloggers angry? We spend 24 hours a day blogging from our world headquarters in North Dakota for no pay. That’s okay. Some people don’t like our opinions. That is okay too. What really irks us though is when REAL journalists “borrow” story ideas from us without in some way acknowledging our existence. As bloggers, linking back to the original source is a requisite. On the flip-side, we will often blog about some topic on our site, only to see it a day later in some “legitimate” newspaper without any credit to us. This next example however, is just flat-out fake journalism based on content from our site.

Here is a comment that our own Manish Vij made on my entry about a racist city councilman in Orange City, FL:

Manish Vij on November 2, 2005 11:48 PM · Direct link
Wow, what an ass. Why not send Sherrill a polite, firm note: donsherrill@earthlink.net

Keep it clean, folks.

Later on Manish sent out an email over the South Asian Journalists Association listserv:

An Orlando city councilman made some incredibly insulting remarks about his Indian-American election opponent. Apparently his knowledge of geography is shaky… You can email him at: donsherrill@earthlink.net. Be firm but polite— keep it clean.

[Later] Sorry, folks, I meant Orange City, Florida.

Now, here is a quote taken from an article titled “Anti-Indian slurs mar US city council elections” about the same councilman, which appears in India’s Daily News and Analysis (DNA):

“I think it is important that Sherrill understands that he has offended Indians. We are inviting everyone to email him at donsherrill@earthlink.net. Be firm but polite — keep it clean,” said Orange city resident Manoj Vij. [Link]

Uttara Choudhury
Saturday, November 05, 2005 09:01 IST

See anything strange folks? I will bet my left nut that there is no Manoj Vij in Orange City, FL. I will bet my right one that this reporter created a fake source with a fake quote and forwarded it to his/her editors by using Manish’s comment.

The verdict was unanimous;’twas the best meetup EVER. Photographic evidence of that here.

October 30th, 2005, San Francisco: four current SM bloggers and six Bay Area mutineers met at North Beach’s yummy, caffeinated, iconic, no-worries-no-matter-HOW-long-we-stayed Caffe Greco and didn’t leave for six hours. Well, it was SEVEN for a certain guest blogger who forgot that daylight savings time commenced at 2, on Sunday. ;) Hey—that’s what she gets for being so unbrown, i.e. on time. Had she been the standard I.S.T.-mandated hour late, she still would’ve been on time, except this time, with the rest of us. ;)

I attempted to live-blog the merriment, like I did the last time it was held in San Francisco; sadly, an unexpected lack of wireless prevented that. Forgive me for making you wait 48 hours? :)

Unpolished transcript, after the jump…

Just a lightning-quick reminder (what IS it with me getting kicked out of the few, feeble places with net access out here???) about Sunday’s MEETUP.

Be there or be gossiped about. Viciously. ;)

VHAT: Meetup!
VHEN: October 30, 2pm
VHERE: Caffe Greco, 423 Columbus Ave

I promise to hold court until at least 6pm, so IST-adherents should be accomodated, just fine. So far, rumor has it that current Guest Bloggers extraordinaire Saheli and Ads will be there, signing autographs if you are exceptionally lucky.

I will probably be live-blogging it, like last time, since unlike HERE, North Beach has wayyy more wifi for the travel-weary and net-addicted. Whether or not the revolution is blogged, it WILL be photographed. So prepare to paneer it up, big time. As for who is on the Wee Eye Pee: come one, come all, blogger, comment-crafter, lurker and anti-Mutineer alike. We don’t bite.

Usually.

But it IS the day before Halloween, so if you get lucky… ;)

I’m still high off all the fun I had at Arzan’s adorable apartment, at the Brooklyn Meetup last week, so I feel like having some more meetup-induced bliss.

A week from today, join me at Caffe Greco in North Beach (in San Francisco) for a bit of a survivor’s brunch (since I will be recovering from what is sure to be a legendary Saturday night, filled to the brim with debauchery, mais oui). Two o’clock work for you? That should be perrrfect, to get all your tardy kundis there by Three.

Why will I be at home on the Wessss Saeeeed? To celebrate the vedding of a very special Mutineer, who is precious to a few of us North Dakota-bunking bloggers. If I didn’t have to schlep my mom back home on the Saturday after that blessed event, I would’ve had the meetup on Sunday, November 6. Who knows? If you whine prettily, I might hold office hours at my belowed Greco THEN, too. ;)

VHAT: Meetup!
VHEN: October 30, 2pm
VHERE: Caffe Greco, 423 Columbus Ave

Come painted and coordinated, because ye shall surely be photographed and flickr’d, that much is true. Can’t wait to meet you, and bounce off the walls from the cappuccino drip that Greco always hooks me up with…last time I was there for SIX HOURS, so no carping in the comments section ten days from now about how you were late and we were already gone. I keed, I keed! ;)