Monthly Archives: September 2004

Kashmiri family held hostage over love marriage

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Two young Kashmiri Muslims recently eloped against their families’ wishes and are in hiding. The village elders have ordered the man’s family to offer a bride and cash to the woman’s family and are allegedly holding the man’s family hostage to ensure compliance.

This takes the theory of vicarious liability to a whole new level. But merely taking them hostage stinks of rank amateurism. Why not follow the lead of Russian counterterrorism and send the couple a severed hand? That would really get the point across: love hurts, babe.

Mira Nair at work on ‘The Namesake’

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Time Asia runs an interesting profile on Mira Nair (also see Sajit’s post):

Nair was also, she claims, an unwanted child—or, as she puts it, a “contraceptual blunder.” In 1957 the Indian government was worried about its exploding population, and her father, a senior bureaucrat, had sworn to limit the family to the two sons they already had. He sent his wife Praveen to a clinic for an abortion, but she couldn’t bring herself to go through with it…

…Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love was universally skewered, and even Nair disowned it as an “aberration.” (Time)

As Amardeep Singh has fisked in far greater detail, some reviewers have complained about the desi influences in Vanity Fair:

The buzz is all about how Nair has played up Thackeray’s Indian influences—he was born in Calcutta—including a Bollywood dance number and an ending shot in the Rajasthani fort town of Jodhpur. The New York Times griped about the “outlandish” sight of Witherspoon doing a “grinding Indian-flavored hoochy-cooch, worthy of Britney Spears,” saying it seemed “shoehorned in from another movie.” (Time)

Nair defended her colonialism-centric angle as a legitimate, innovative interpretation:

The basis of what I loved and which I thought Thackeray plumed so acutely and beautifully was the relationship between the colony and the empire. Thackeray himself was born in Calcutta and came to England, and I always saw him and his writing as a sort of satiric look at his own society; that he was the ultimate insider/outsider and I think it was in that realm and that vein that he created his great heroine, Becky Sharp… (Metro)

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Victorinox takes a stab at the Sikh market

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Swiss Army knife maker Victorinox is creating a line of high-end kirpans for Sikhs, saying premium knives should be treated with the same reverence as samurai swords (via Ennis):

“The first kirpan — with a handle made of solid gold and studded with diamonds and precious stones — will be presented to the Darbar Sahib at the Golden Temple in Amritsar before being rolled out in India, UK, US and Canada.”

Next up: a Victorinox kukri knife for Gurkhas.

Personally, I’d be happier with a desi Swiss Army knife with red chili and pickle dispensers. I’ve got no beef with ethnic cuisines and would never pull my knife on them. But I’d whip it out against continental, nouveau, and that anemic simulacrum, American vegetarian.

New Indian government frees universities

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The new Indian government is unleashing universities from some of the pro-bribery, anti-intellectual freedom regulations the previous government imposed:

[Education minister Arjun Singh] has… scrapped a controversial order, also issued by the BJP government, that required private donations to public universities to be routed through a special government agency; and allowed India’s universities to seek collaborations with their foreign counterparts without obtaining the government’s permission. In addition, Mr. Singh has ordered the replacement of high-school history textbooks that the previous government had changed to reflect a Hindu-supremacist viewpoint.

Centralizing financial control over donor money? No prizes for guessing what the purpose of that was. Striking down the new regulations allows more intellectual freedom:

The academics were up in arms because they thought it was an effort to blatantly promote ministerial intervention and curb the autonomy of the universities.

And the education minister calls the reversion of textbooks ‘de-saffronisation.’ So far, the new Manmohan Singh government is doing good things.

Sick of spices

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Blogger Priya Lal wrote that the Oscars found many desi films ‘not Indian enough’ for the foreign language category. But what’s Indian enough?

Second-gen writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali have largely been re-telling their parentsÂ’ tales. ItÂ’s interesting as a topic but repetitive as an entire oeuvre, made even worse by book covers which all feature nubile brown women with mehndi hands and first-gen authors who willingly swan with incense and sarod music at book readings… Peacocks and payals are gorgeous when judiciously applied, and any desi could be forgiven for admiring a royal, nose-ringed nariz evocative of Mughal miniature. It gets annoying mainly when lit and film treats culture as a tourist backdrop, a Potemkin village with the thinnest faciæ of stereotype… when directors ask for the Peter Sellers / Gunga Din caricature of a desi accent rather than the real one, like Apu on The Simpsons and the dadÂ’s accent in Harold and Kumar. ThatÂ’s just insulting… CanÂ’t we all just agree to consign mehndi to weddings, mangos to dinner plates and the words exotic and spicy to the seventh circle of hell?

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Terraforming religious rights

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A Sikh truck driver from Yuba City was cited for carrying a concealed weapon while on a produce delivery haul in Oregon. His kirpan is a ceremonial dagger common to Sikhism (via Ennis).

The officer allegedly dragged Gill to the ground, shoved a knee into his back and shoved his head into the ground as he handcuffed him, he said. The officer then told him that the police look to pull over people who look as though they are from India, Pakistan and or of the Sikh faith, which Gill and Sraon said is racial profiling and illegal… Gill was cited for carrying a concealed weapon and told to appear in Douglas County Court… Sraon said the kirpan is not a weapon but a religious symbol and therefore protected by law under the first amendment of the Constitution.

Kirpan case law is an example of a very interesting body of law dealing with the conflict of religious beliefs and the public interest (e.g. peyote in Native American rituals, sharia vs. common law, religions which ban modern medical treatment). Since Sikhs are in the minority in most places, they’re often afterthoughts when laws affecting them are enacted. For example, the new hijab ban in France, ostensibly aimed at undermining militant Islam, also inadvertently bans turbans. Nobody thought to ask the small French Sikh community for input, it was a boundary case. And in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, wearing a kirpan provided an easy pretext for cops to detain Sikhs without suspicion of wrongdoing. Continue reading →

We don’t die, we multiply

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No comment – MSNBC – Hindus Worry Over Christian, Muslim Growth.

BANGALORE, India – The leader of India’s Hindu-nationalist opposition on Tuesday voiced concern over the growth rate among minority Muslims and Christians, urging them to practice family planning to preserve the nation’s
The data released Monday showed the share of Hindus in the country’s 1.028 billion population fell from 82 percent in 1991 to 80.5 percent in 2001. The portion of Muslims increased from 12.2 percent to 13.4 percent and Christians rose from 2.32 percent to 2.34 percent.

“This imbalance is not good for the country,” Naidu said. “Family planning is the need of the hour for all people.”

Could the non-Hindu brown folks engage in a bit more “Family Planning”, please?!?!?!

Anupam Kher on ‘ER’

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Veteran Bollywood actors Anupam and Kirron Kher will play the parents of Parminder Nagra’s med student character in an upcoming episode of ER (via Ennis). Anupam Kher already played Nagra’s dad in Bend It Like Beckham and will also play Aishwarya Rai’s dad in Bride and Prejudice.

That’s the trouble with desis: you let one in, and they’ll bring in all their relatives 😉 I once hired a great desi dude for my group and later left that job. When I came back to visit some friends, I found out he’d taken over my office and even my phone number. Apparently we’d turned that position permanently brown. Colonize, y’all!

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i think she’s anti-Bush

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i hope the rest of you enjoyed your holiday weekend as much as i did. 🙂 i spent the latter part of today catching up on email and my bloglines feeds, where i found THIS:

The New York Times ran a story today about how the city’s luxury strip clubs have been sitting empty all week. This is a bit baffling, honestly. At one club, at least, tonight, a barback instructed a waitress to keep at hand a good supply of speared olives and lemons “for when 50,000 Republicans show up.” In the dressing room, meanwhile, the dancers popped speed-like pills in preparation for a long night…
…Yesterday I saw a youngish Republican point to the sparkly dot on the forehead of the South Asian dancer gracing his lap. “What’s that?” he asked. “A bindi,” she answered matter-of-factly. “A what?” he asked. “A bindi.” They went back and forth in this way for some time before she said, with some hostility, “It’s my heritage.”
This sort of tension has been brewing for several days now. If the Republicans, buoyed by Bush’s nomination, get randy tomorrow night, it may boil over.

via the village voice’s “Hot Girls, Frisky Delegates: RNC Diary of a Strip-Club Waitress”

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