What’s on an Anarchist’s Ipod?

noise_brigade.jpg With the Republican National Convention starting tomorrow, I was looking for some tunes to play loud enough so that I could drown out the spin and pandering. Luckily I found just the thing to do the trick. From the Seattle Times:

Their goal is to disrupt the status quo, and they usually do it without an invitation.

It takes mere minutes for the Infernal Noise Brigade to enliven a crowd — on the steps of the Federal Building, in the streets of Prague, or surrounding a Starbucks in Pioneer Square.

The brigade has gained a reputation for providing a soundtrack for dissent in Seattle, but many might not realize how far the music spreads.

How far does it spread exactly and what kind of music do they play?

None of the lyrics are in English. The INB does a Peruvian song about people struggling against the rule, a French freedom song, a Portuguese song about a guerrilla soldier and his lover having their last breakfast together, and a Czech folk song.

“We come from different backgrounds, and we all borrow melodies,” said Alix Chappell, a 26-year-old vocalist.

“It’s the kind of stuff you would find in a tape stall in India,” Strasser said. “A guy howling in Hindi, with rockabilly guitar and a jazz melody from the 1950s. It’s different kinds of music being misused.”

Here’s a clip you can rock to during the convention.

Jains and Hasidim spar over diamond business

Jains from the small Gujarati town of Palanpur now dominate the worldwide diamond wholesaling business, taking in 65% of the revenues of the diamond capital in Belgium:

In what was once a predominantly Jewish neighborhood near Antwerp’s central station, young Indians in Armani suits haggle with Hasidic diamond buyers in long black coats, side curls and skullcaps. Hoveniersstraat, a street once celebrated for its kosher restaurants, now offers the best curry in town.

Eighty percent of diamonds worldwide now pass through Indian hands:

Indians like Mr. Shah gained a commercial edge over the Jews by sending their rough diamonds for finishing work to family-owned factories in Bombay and the northern Indian state of Gujarat, where labor costs are as much as 80% lower than in Antwerp… The Indians also proved canny at polishing and cutting the lower-quality rough diamonds that Jewish traders typically overlooked… “We turned cotton into silk…”

India now employs nearly a million diamond polishers. Meanwhile, Jewish diamantaires had some culturally-specific business issues:

Indians… aren’t required by their religion to close their businesses from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday… Many [Jews] were Holocaust survivors afraid to part with their assets or send very expensive valuables far away… (WSJ)

Continue reading

Fraternal competition for the almighty dollar

Second-gen U.S. desis sometimes compete for business also outsourced to desis in India and Pakistan. And the second gen are not guaranteed to be as professionally hardcore and driven as either their parents or new desi immigrants their age. But we’re not the only community with these tensions: the New York Times reports that that American blacks are also competing with African immigrants:

“These are very aggressive people who are coming here,” said Dr. Austin, who is calling for a frank dialogue between native-born and foreign-born blacks. “I don’t berate immigrants for that; they have given up a lot to get here. But we’re going to be in competition with them. We have to be honest about it. That is one of the dividing lines.”…

By 2000, foreign-born blacks constituted 30 percent of the blacks in New York City, 28 percent of the blacks in Boston and about a quarter here in Montgomery County, Md… Bobby Austin, an administrator at the University of the District of Columbia who attended the meeting in Washington, said he understood why some blacks were offended when Mr. Kamus claimed an African-American identity. Dr. Austin said some people feared that black immigrants and their children would snatch up the hard-won opportunities made possible by the civil rights movement…

In New York City, for example, and this is strictly in my humble opinion, the 1st-gen desis who’ve made it through the immigration strainer are much more hardcore on average than U.S.-born desis of the same age. That’s due to the requirements of U.S. immigration law as well as the financial, familial and cultural hardships of emigration. Continue reading

‘Maps for Lost Lovers’ nominated for Booker

Nadeem Aslam’s tale of honor killings, Maps for Lost Lovers, has been placed on the long list for the Booker Prize this year (via Kitabkhana). Novelist Kamila Shamsie reviewed the book in the Guardian:

[T]he most extraordinary of the characters is Shamas’s wife, Kaukub… she is the young bride who used to step out of the bath and wake up her husband by twisting her hair into a yard-long rope and letting beads of water fall over him, but then grew into a woman who equates sex with shame and sin… a woman’s gold bracelet is composed of a series of semi-colons; dead tulips lean out of a bin like the necks of drunk swans; a falling icicle is a radiant dagger.

Anju Bobby George places sixth in long jump

Indian medal hope Anju Bobby George set a personal best and broke the Indian national record with her sixth-place finish in the long jump at the Olympics.

Vinod has rightly complained about the unsupportive Indian press, but the Indian Express had kind words for George:

It may have been a failure for Anju Bobby George. But it was a success story for Indian athletics… In fact her 6.83 was better than her own national mark of 6.74 which she had done twice.

And the Times of India sent this valentine:

It’s alright, Anju, you are our Athena

She aroused great passions among Indian sports fans just as sprint queen P T Usha had two decades ago… To her credit, Anju kept her cool and pushed herself to the limit. In the end, Anju Bobby George achieved what she was meant to: break through a mental threshold for millions of Indians.

Meanwhile, the women’s 4×400 relay team, a.k.a. the Secret Punjabi-Malayalee Sprinters Alliance of Rajwinder Kaur, Manjeet Kaur, K.M. Beenamol and Chitra Soman, qualified for the finals, just as a previous women’s 4×400 team did in Los Angeles in ’84.

Update: Mango Swami observed their shapely modesty:

[T]hey were the only team not wearing those skimpy bikini running shorts. Forget cutting-edge aerodynamics, we kick it old school, Umbro shorts and waist-length plaits.

Update 2: The relay team placed seventh in the finals after their anchor, Manjeet Kaur, fell ill and had to be replaced with an alternate.

Amitava Kumar–A Husband of a Fanatic

From the Author of Passport Photos and the (IMO) brilliant Bombay London New York, (see my rather long review of it from the Satya Circle)comes Husband of a Fanatic, “fiercely personal essay on the idea of the enemy,” according to the British Council website. The Council recently sponsored a book reading for Kumar, while he is on a book-tour in India.

More from the Penguin website:

In the summer of 1999, while the Kargil War was being fought, author Amitava Kumar married a Pakistani Muslim. That event led to a process of discovery that made Kumar examine the relationship not only between India and Pakistan but also between Hindus and Muslims inside India. Written with complete honesty and with no claims to journalistic detachment, this book chronicles the complicity that binds the writer to the rioter. Unlike both the fundamentalists and the secularists, Kumar finds—or makes—utterly human those whom he opposes. More than a travelogue which takes the reader to Wagah, Patna, Bhagalpur, Karachi, Kashmir, and even Johannesburg, this book, then, becomes a portrait of the people the author meets in these places, people dealing with the consequences of the politics of faith.

The book, which was released by Penguin India will be published in the States by the New Press in January 2005. Click here to go to the authors homepage.

Luckily, I am headed to South Asia for work in a couple weeks and can pick it up early.

Delhi WiFi costs more if you’re white

The Delhi airports just got wireless Internet access today for Rs. 60/hour at the domestic airport. But if you’re (wink, wink) at the international airport, you pay the more princely sum of Rs. 100. It’s a subtle way to soak foreigners, just like the higher tourist fee for foreigners at the Taj Mahal.

What constitutes a foreigner, exactly? What about a Canadian desi who’s an Indian citizen and, just to throw the game off, has an Amrikan accent? Entire genres of literature have been written on these shades of sepia.

And nothing makes consumers see red like discriminatory pricing. It puts off visitors and marks a country as Third World in mentality. In contrast, it’s precisely the U.S.’ tolerant atmosphere that siren-songs the global wunderkind. The number of Americans happily working in India is just starting to increase. For some short-term revenue, you’d mortgage your country’s economic future?

Of Course…A Desi Doc on Dr. 90210

I guess it isn’t that surprising that one of the plastic surgeons featured on the ever-popular E! reality show– “Dr. 90210” is a desi, Raj Kanodia. Hailing from Calcutta, India Dr. Kanodia did his schooling at the University of Illinois and specializes in the face, head and neck. And, for all you ladies Dr. Kanodia is single and enjoys gardening and traveling in Europe. That might sound like crap, but that is what is says under his bio on the show’s website. His quote is even better:

“I don’t have the luxury to fail, because I must deliver perfect results 100 percent of the time.”

In case you haven’t had a chance to catch Dr. 90210 yet, a marathon will air this sunday August 29–check your local listings.

Posted in TV

The case up north

Sepia Mutiny earlier reported on the trial of the accused in the AI 182 bombing. Well, this trial north of the border is just getting whackier & whackier – TheStar.com – Defence in Air India trial calls last witness.

VANCOUVER — The defence in the Air India case called its final witness today, ending another segment of the lengthy trial that included insults and angry outbursts, expletives, an admitted drug dealer and witnesses with shaky credibility.

An interesting cast of characters includes a drug dealer with that oh-so-Punjabi nickname – Mindy

Raminder Singh (Mindy) Bhandher, 26, was testifying on behalf of accused Air India bomber Ripudaman Singh Malik, who Bhandher said he regarded as a generous father figure. But during his testimony, Bhandher also acknowledged a lengthy history of drug dealing, smuggling and fraud.

A peace leader who knows how to deliver a verbal smackdown –

When he did testify — describing himself as a peaceful, devout Sikh leader — he shouted expletives at a Crown prosecutor who alleged he knew about the bombing plot and selectively warned friends to fly another day. “Bullshit!” Daljit Singh Sandhu yelled from the witness stand.

And even a F911 angle –

The defence’s case even had a connection — however tenuous — to documentary filmmaker Michael Moore and the popular movie Fahrenheit 911. Retired FBI agent Jack Cloonan, a commentator on U.S. news shows who makes an appearance in Moore’s latest film, was called as a witness for Bagri. Cloonan criticized another FBI agent who testified for the Crown. … The Crown accused him of weighing in on a case he knew nothing about.

This must be their OJ case but with desi’s & jumbo jets instead of ex-footballers & White Bronco’s…

The education of Hanif Kureishi

Literary wrangler Sukhdev Sandhu, he of the wondrous New York magazine piece on the desified Spiderman, interviews Hanif Kureishi about his new memoir about his father. In My Ear at His Heart, Kureishi writes of his father’s assimilationism, marrying an Englishwoman and refusing to teach his kids Urdu:

“My dad was always very Anglicised. He felt himself to be a Chekhovian figure, wandering aimlessly and foolishly around a country where other people were very committed to religion or community. He saw England as a new start. He wanted us to be English; he didn’t want any of that in-between stuff. So I didn’t have access to India or Pakistan. If his brothers came round he’d speak Urdu, but he didn’t want my sister or me to learn it. I spent my childhood sitting around listening to people speaking in a language I didn’t understand.”

Hanif’s ascension as an iconic ‘in-betweener’ is a form of rebellion, a deep irony. It’s like the Bradford Muslims who turn fundamentalist because their parents aren’t, or the Iranians who are stridently pro-USA because their government isn’t. And Kureishi’s inability to understand Urdu left him doubly isolated, both from the outside world as a ‘Paki’ and from the Muslim community.

This piece reminds me of how much richer the diasporic milieu is in the UK than in the U.S., we’re such hicks in comparison. On Kureishi’s mentoring of other British Asians, including the writer of Bombay Dreams: Continue reading