Monthly Archives: October 2004

Police kill notorious dacoit

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Veerappan, a notorious Tamil bandit with a truly impressive handlebar moustache, has finally been found and shot dead by police (thanks, Ennis). Veerappan was the Indian D.B. Cooper, an elusive fugitive whose freedom haunted law enforcement for years. His fame ranked with that of Indian-Vietnamese serial killer Charles Sobhraj.

Veerappan, a Tamil, was accused of more than 100 murders – as well as kidnapping, smuggling and poaching – and had been on the run for 20 years…

He was involved in the kidnapping two years ago of former state minister of Karnataka, H Nagappa, who was found dead after three months in captivity. He was also involved in the kidnapping for a famous film star, Rajkumar, four years ago. The film star was released after 108 days of captivity, allegedly for a huge ransom.

The Acorn has more:

India’s very own October surprise: Towards the fag end of his career, Veerappan did try to diversify into the new business model — terrorism — but couldn’t quite find the right sponsors in time… it is still good to see him sent off the field by a bullet paid for by the Indian tax-payer. For a time it looked like nature would claim him first.

Desi Culture March…

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I’m in Sao Paulo for a biz meeting and the local sales team took me out for a grand sushi dinner (Sao Paulo has the largest single overseas Japanese population with just shy of 1.5M of the 18M Paulisanos ). I was far from my small town / farm homeland. Nevertheless, I took a certain comfort that the local radio station the Japanese restaurant played for us diners featured the track Tu Tu Hai Wahi by DJ Aqueel.

Freaky.

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Have a passport? You are probably a Democrat.

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What’s with my provocative title? Remember a while back when I posted this entry about a group called Democrats Abroad trying to register expats in India so that they could vote absentee in the U.S. election? Well its not just India. Several articles recently have followed this phenomena. I covered this on my own blog a few weeks ago but the issue keeps surfacing in the media so I thought I would bring it to the attention of SM readers. Here is an excerpt from Newsweek:

With polls projecting a tight race, Americans abroad know just how much their votes could count. A recent tally of two Democratic Web sites, OverseasVote2004.com and OverseasVote.com, shows that 75 percent of the total number of voters has registered in the last 10 weeks, and more than 40 percent of those voters are from swing states. Although they did not give the exact figures, Republican organizers outside the U.S. claim the number of voters signing on with Republicans Abroad in Europe has skyrocketed 400 percent since 2000. The number of chapters of Democrats Abroad has risen from 33 to 70 since the beginning of this year. “Based on our figures, 5.3 percent of overseas voters are from Florida [and] 4.4 percent from Pennsylvania. Washington, Michigan and Ohio all tie for about 3 percent,” says Americans Overseas for Kerry’s Jim Brenner, who is based in Boston. Ironically, the real battleground states of this election could end up being countries like Canada, France and Mexico.

Slate magazine however, recognized another angle to this new movement which is quite interesting:

While Americans who go abroad to kill people vote Republican, Americans who go abroad to do just about anything else vote Democratic. This is the logic behind the unprecedented effort to get out the vote among U.S. civilians overseas, and the reason that effort is overwhelmingly Democratic.

How have they formulated this dubious theory? Continue reading →

Hemachandra numbers everywhere

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Supplesomething forwarded me an interesting NPR piece on Manjul Bhargava, 28, a professor of number theory at Princeton who discusses how the Fibonacci series pops up not just in mathematics but also in the arts.

The Fibonacci series is the set of numbers beginning with 1, 1 where every number is the sum of the previous two numbers. The series begins with 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. They were known in India before Fibonacci as the Hemachandra numbers. And the ratio of any two successive Fibonacci numbers approximates a ratio, ~1.618, called the golden section or golden mean.

It’s long been known that the Fibonacci series turns up frequently in nature. The numbers of petals on a daisy and the dimensions of a section of a spiral nautilus shell are usually Fibonacci numbers. For plants, this is because the fractional part of the golden mean, a constant called phi (0.618), is the rotation fraction (222.5 degrees) which yields the most efficient and scalable packing of circular objects such as seeds, petals and leaves.

Continue reading →

Phonebanking for Kerry

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My college roommate Tushar, asked me if I would start an LA phonebank operation for John Kerry. Basically I would get a bunch of fellow Dems together and we would use our unlimited weekend cell phone minutes to call likely South Asian voters in Florida. We would plead Kerry’s case and get them to turn out to vote. A very smart strategy I think. Usually with me the ends justify the means. Bush must be defeated at all costs. Yet in this case, its hard for me to commit time to a candidate that I am not crazy about. I haven’t yet taken him up on his request, but I may still. From India West as reported by New California Media:

Last weekend, from both the east coast and west coast, phone calls went into the homes of registered South Asian voters in Florida with a simple message from callers: Vote for John Kerry.

With pollsters predicting a razor-thin election still too close to call, and Florida once again a toss-up state, the calls may well have a decisive impact. The Kerry supporters hope to reach 20,000 registered South Asian voters in Florida before they are done.

In what could be a first for the community, young South Asian supporters of the Massachusetts senator are getting involved in the nitty gritty of grass-roots campaigning in a U.S. presidential campaign.

“We think for the first time in the history of American politics, it was a phone bank targeted specifically to South Asian American voters, and phone calls made by South Asian Americans,” Tushar Sheth, a 28-year-old New York-based attorney, told India-West.

If anyone does want to be involved in a phonebank operation you can get information at SAKI2004.

A Kashmiri Solution Around the Corner?

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Strategy Page reports – military news about India-Pakistan –

October 18, 2004: Pakistan has offered to divide up Indian Kashmir according to the wishes of the Kashmiris. The would likely mean that the most valuable part of the province, the mostly Moslem Kashmir valley, would go to Pakistan, while the Hindu and Buddhist areas would opt for India. But maybe not. The Kashmiri Moslems are aware that India has a real democracy and a growing economy, versus dictatorship and economic chaos in Pakistan. There is much less corruption in India. Over a decade of Islamic terrorism, even if technically on their behalf, has left many Kashmiri Moslems fearful, if not outright hostile towards Islamic radicalism. Putting it all to a vote would be unpopular with nationalists in both countries, but is one solution that would end the fighting, or at least reduce it. However, India has a point in that Pakistan’s tolerance for Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistani Kashmir is the main source of the violence in Kashmir. That said, half a century of fighting over this province is wearing out a lot of Indians and Pakistanis, especially since both have nuclear weapons. This means a battlefield solution is no longer possible.

Seeing Econ Opportunity create the motive for peace warms my little libertarian heart 😉

Quantity and Quality

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The UK is trying to encourage more Sikhs to join the British army. Why?

… at the time of First World War, Sikhs formed 20 per cent of the British army. That meant 100,000 Sikhs. “In the 100 years to 1945, there were some 14 Victoria Crosses awarded to Sikhs. On a per capita basis, given the size of Sikh regiments, that must be a record for the entire British armed forces,”

Background: Right now there are only around 100 Sikhs in the British armed forces, which is more than the US or Canadian militaries, but still not much in light of past levels of recruitment.

Only 1,354 Victoria Crosses have been awarded since the first in 1856. The Congressional Medal of Honor is the US counterpart to the VC; it’s the highest award given out by the British.

p.s. No, I don’t buy into notions of “martial races.”

Prince2Priest

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prince2priest.jpg

This is something deep from my dusty archives. At Ohio University, where I studied visual communications for a year, we were asked to illustrate a concept. I took the legend behind the Buddha and his transformation from stately prince to the high priest of a new ideology – perhaps even a religion – as my concept. Given that Buddhist art is already so beautifully, how do you go about illustrating that?

I found an Indian ornament lying around in my apartment; a puppet of a man wearing a sparkling turban riding on a legless horse. I used his face alone and intentionally lit him in the background to appear overbearing, ominous and perhaps even violent. Notice the direction of the light. It’s from below. Ever see this technique in a horror flick?

Several years back, my mother sent me a handpainted scroll from Bhutan depicting the Buddha. If you can believe it, the six Buddhas in the bottom are all from that same image. Ideally there should be eight of them to symbolize the eight-fold path in Buddhist theology, but I couldn’t get them all to fit (this time).

The images were shot on film, scanned at a high resolution and then brought into Photoshop where there was quite a bit of manipulating (something I wouldn’t ever do to an editorial image). Each of the Buddhas were sent through a bunch of Photoshop filters. Each filter tweaks the image to a specification that I was happy to see on my screen. I really wasn’t sure what they would look like before I got started and I was pleasantly surprised by what the results looked like in the end.

The exercise was a grand departure from what I usually do – wedding photojournalism. It was really a time to experiment and have fun. I am not really sure I have conveyed the principal premise of the image clearly. Let’s just call this a work in progress, shall we?

Happy Curry Week!

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I’ve always hated korma; I’m not sure what that says about me, but the next time I order Aloo Vindaloo at Gaylord’s Ghirardelli, I’m going to smirk as I think of this survey from England:

One fifth of men questioned for Sky digital and Star Plus’ National Curry Week (October 17 – 24) survey said, they had eaten a vindaloo curry to impress a lady or their friends! When it comes to impressing friends or members of the opposite sex Lancashire has the toughest taste buds with over 20 per cent who have braved a vindaloo in the face of peer pressure. Whilst those in Newcastle seem to have the puniest palette and are least likely (7 per cent) to indulge in hot and spicy dishes to win over friends and lovers!
Women seem to be tongue-challenged when it comes to vindaloos. The findings show four in 10 men like their curries hot or extremely hot compared to only one in 10 women. Two-thirds (62 per cent) of women questioned admit they like mild curries, such as a korma.
Star Plus’ spokeswoman, Suruchi Sthalekar said: “The results are hilarious, I can just imagine the scenes in curry houses and homes across the UK. To think men measure their sexual prowess against the spiciness of their curry. And I would urge all woman to go out there and try vindaloo today to prove we can handle it.”

Handle it? I consummately require it. 😉

“After all, what is sexier than someone who exudes both passion and compassion?”

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As a life-long vegetarian, I’m thrilled to learn that for the third year in a row, Amitabh is India’s hottest herbivore, according to your favourite animal rights outfit:

The veggie voters have spoken, and it is official – the Big B is again the Big V, and breaking the Bollywood monopoly, Clueless star Alicia Silverstone has won PETA India’s Hottest Vegetarian Alive Contest for 2004. More than 50,000 Web surfers cast their votes this year.
This year, the contest was even hotter, with vegetarians like Shahid Kapoor, Pamela Anderson, Pierce Brosnan, Yana Gupta, Avril Lavigne, Mandira Bedi, Tobey Maguire, Shania Twain and Esha Deol as nominees.
Celebrities cite many reasons for forgoing flesh foods, from avoiding the cruelty to animals that is inherent in meat production to improving their health and energy levels to helping the environment by not contributing to hog- and chicken-farm pollution.

Amitabh is just one of many stars who probably taste better. Upon perusing the list of esteemed nominees, I was surprised to find that “Lord of the Rings” star and blazing-ball-of-awesome-hotness Orlando Bloom is also an herbivore. As if he wasn’t fantastic enough already. Stothrum!

Sadly, Mutineer Manish wasn’t nominated, or he would’ve surely killed Big B’s shot at a three-peat. 😉