Monthly Archives: June 2005

Edison may get an Asian-American mayor

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Jun Choi, the Asian-American mayoral candidate for Edison, NJ who was dissed by the Jersey Guys, upset the incumbent mayor 55%-45% in the Democratic primary (thanks, Saurav). That virtually guarantees the 34-year-old’s victory in November:

It is the first time in Edison history that the mayoral candidate backed by the Democratic Party was defeated in a primary… [Home News Tribune]

… [The incumbent] said he could think of two reasons why he didn’t win: The flap over the 101.5 FM “Jersey Guys” show when one of the hosts made a derogatory comment about Choi and Asian Americans, and a feeling that voters simply wanted a change after nearly 12 years with him as mayor. [Newsday]

I’d like to say it’s pretty clear what happened, that Edison resoundingly voted against anti-Asian racism. But it seems the Jersey Guys’ complaint that Choi was targeting minority voters was accurate, not that there’s anything wrong with that:

Choi’s primary victory is seen as a sign that Asian-Americans have arrived as a political force in the state’s fifth largest municipality, where nearly one in three voters is of Asian descent. “It shows the graduation of the Asian-American community to a level of sophistication, where they can impact an election,” said Edison Council President Parag Patel, the first Indian-American elected in the township…

But Asian officials and others say what pushed Choi over the top in Tuesday’s election was his campaign’s decision to target the burgeoning Asian-American population with literature printed in Asian languages and ads in ethnic media… a strategy Patel said helped him get elected, too… The New York-based [AALDEF]… found nearly 10 percent of the respondents were first-time voters. “This is a very high number, particularly in a primary election…” [Star-Ledger]

And the Jersey Guys, jockeying with Paris Hilton for the Chutzpah Stakes, took credit for the win. Unbelievable:

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Operation Meth Merchant

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A massive Methamphetamine bust went down in Georgia recently. Close to 50 people were charged. GG2.net reports:

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Around 50 Indian American convenience store owners and employees have been arrested, in Georgia, and charged with selling substances used in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine (meth), a highly addictive stimulant.

An indictment unveiled in a US magistrateÂ’s court, on Monday, said the arrests were made in six Georgia counties over the past month under an operation to hunt down peddlers of meth ingredients. Several of those arrested have been released on bonds ranging from $10,000 to $50,000.

Some of the defence attorneys have accused the investigators of targeting immigrant merchants, most of them of Indian origin. Attorney Steven Sadow, who is representing six defendants, said he will investigate if officials singled out Indians in their “Operation Meth Merchant”.

“I want to know why they went after the Indians to begin with,” said Sadow. He proposes to file a motion to “dismiss all charges based on selective prosecution”. One of the defendants also asserted that the charges stemmed from stereotyping and generalisation.

A list of defendants can be read in the DOJ release. There are a lot of Patels up in there. It doesn’t immediately strike me as “selective prosecution.” I mean Indians do own a lot of convenience stores, and convenience stores do sell drugs. Of course a quick news brief doesn’t give the full story, especially the “convenience store demographics” of the area.

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“Now is the hour! ROHIRRIM!” (updated)

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weerasinghe.jpgRohan Weerasinghe is the chosen one– chosen to head a major New York law firm, that is. Weerasinghe is now the Senior Partner at Shearman & Sterling. An American of Sri Lankan descent, he becomes the first brown person EVER to ascend such great heights.

From the firm’s press release:

Weerasinghe, 54, was previously head of the Capital Markets Group, and is a member of the firmÂ’s Policy Committee. He joined Shearman & Sterling in 1977 and was elected to the partnership in 1985. Born in Sri Lanka, Weerasinghe was educated in the United States and holds a JD from Harvard Law School and an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar. Weerasinghe earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard College summa cum laude.

Do you think the Harvard Annual-giving people call him three times as much? I’m just asking…

Still wondering why this is a big deal? According to Columbia J-school Prof Sree Sreenivasan,

This is a major achievement for a desi lawyer (and on par with Rajat Gupta’s becoming head of consulting company McKinsey & Co. in 1994).

In fact, this may be a larger opportunity for glee that we thought:

Weerasinghe…is believed to be the first non-white senior partner at a top New York firm.

See? It’s huge!

:+:

Oh, like you could resist using that title. Pffft. Continue reading →

Apul–Bigger and Browner

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We have been getting a bunch of questions as to what became of Apul since he left Sepia Mutiny. Here are a couple of examples:

I’m outraged by Apul’s resignation. Why is he resigning in Nixonian disgrace? What are these new projects? How can Sepia Mutiny be respected as a serious outlet for online blogtastic journalism when its cherished contributors is uncermoniously swept under the rug? [link]

Where is Apul going!? We have to know so we can follow his career! [link]

Well now we have our first word of what became of Apul since his exile. Like many others before him, Apul has decided to leave an ensemble cast and go solo. He’ll be performing his stand-up act this Friday night in Hollywood. Sleuth that I am, did he really think I wouldn’t be able to hunt him down? Tickets can be purchased here. I will be in the audience to check out his act, as well as Sanjay Shah, Nikki Chawla, Reggie D., and Tarun Shetty. They will be filming at the show for a broadcast on desivision TV. I would LiveBlog from the event but then I’d just be a freak.

As an aside, after reading this I have been considering going solo as well.

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Explosive writing

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The Times of London

 reveals that Salman Rushdie narrowly escaped a bomb attack in 1989, only five months after Iran issued its Valentine’s Day fatwa (thanks, Abhi). A Lebanese militant building an RDX bomb in a hollowed-out book made a bid for the Darwin Awards just a couple of miles from Rushdie’s London home:

The radicalised Lebanese citizen, born in the Guinean capital, Conakry, had joined a local Hezbollah… cell while in his teens… Mazeh… [took] a train to London on July 22, 1989. He checked in to Room 303 at the Beverley House Hotel, a five-storey building in Sussex Gardens, Paddington.

On the afternoon of August 3, a large explosion killed him in his room, destroying two floors of the building. Anti-terrorist squad detectives later said that he had died while trying to prime a bomb hidden in a book with RDX explosives. A previously unknown Lebanese group… claimed in a letter to a Beirut newspaper that Mazeh, whom they referred to as Gharib, died preparing an attack ” on the apostate Rushdie”. [Times of London]

In 1998, protesters in Tehran praised the would-be assassin:

After the rally, the militants unveiled a huge wall portrait of Mustafa Mazeh, who was killed by a bomb explosion in London in 1989, which Iranians believe was intended for Mr Rushdie. [BBC]

Die Gazette reports [in German] that an Iranian village gifted Mazeh’s parents with a house on the Caspian Sea, 1.2 acres of land and ten carpets. In Tehran, Mazeh got a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier-style shrine:

“Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh… Martyred in London, August 3, 1989. The first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie.” [Times of London]

This actual plot against Rushdie’s life is slightly more disturbing than Lollywood’s assassination fantasy. I preferred it when poison-pen literary reviews took the form of Michiko Kakutani.

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Everyone recycles (updated)

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Apache Indian resurfaces as a dreadlocked auto mechanic in a remix of Desmond Dekker’s 1969 Jamaican hit ‘The Israelites‘ (thanks, Ashish). His heroines, like the cutie in ‘Pyaar Pyaar,’ used to be fly Punjabans; this one’s a standard-issue, Wonderbra-chested blonde. It’s a smooth tune, but he looks all grown up now. Watch the video.

The Black Eyed Peas just sampled Asha Bhosle (thanks, Harish and Umang). The first 15 seconds of the lead single off their new album, ‘Don’t Phunk With My Heart,’ are a sped-up version of ‘Yeh Mera Dil Yaar Ka Deewana.’ Listen to the original and the new version. Watch the video.

The song from Don is pure masala western. Bhosle also starred in a remix of that song a couple of years ago. The video, with a woman taking revolver-revenge upon her cheatin’ man, was ubiquitous on MTV India.

Here’s a review of the Peas’ new album, Monkey Business:

Other guests of note are… Sting on “Union” (sonically inspired by the former Police-man’s “Englishman in New York”), while funk legend James Brown contributes to a scorching soul track dubbed “They Don’t Want Music.”

Update: Manoj and iTwofs point out that the rest of the melody is lifted from Apradh’s ‘Aye Naujawan Hai Sub Kuchh Yahan’ (1972), also by Bhosle. Listen to the original.

Maybe we need a HollyCat. Although the Peas should credit the composers, it’s hard for the Indian creative industries to take the moral high ground here.

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Desi’s + Porn Princesses

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Not customers but rather, business partners –

In 1998 a California porn princess commissioned a 25-year-old Indian computer wiz to write a piece of software…She had sold all her porn interests and it was time to invest the proceeds. Online gambling was the new buzz and she found a friend of a friend, Anurag Dikshit, a computer engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, to create a programme for casino games such as roulette.

The outcome — the newest Sabeer Bhatia –

The extraordinary result of that meeting was seen yesterday when PartyGaming, the company they created, announced plans to float on the London stock market. Its PartyPoker website is the dominant force in the explosive online poker market and the business will be valued at up to $10bn, or a shade over £5bn – only a little less than Marks & Spencer, or the combined value of British Airways and EMI. At the top price, Mr Dikshit, who owns 42%, will be worth £2.1bn at the age of 33. Ms Parasol, in her late 30s, and her husband, Russ DeLeon, each own 20%, worth £1bn apiece. Billionaire status has rarely been achieved so young or so quickly.

Actually, given that he’s a multi-billionaire, Mr Dikshit will actually be worth several Bhatia’s (who’s estimated to have pocketed only ~200M off Hotmail). My big question for those in the know, don’t most folks with his last name transliterate it to Dixit? Continue reading →

Reappeared

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In April, Abhi posted about two high school girls in New York whom the FBI and Homeland Security jailed on suspicion of being aspiring suicide bombers. The girls were held under Orwellian secrecy, but the case seemed dubious from the start:

“Nobody here believes they are wanna-be suicide bombers,” the [FBI] official added… “We’re not spun up about this case,” said a Homeland Security Department source. [NY Daily News]

After six weeks virtually incommunicado in detention, one girl was released, and the other is being deported to Bangladesh:

… after holding the girls for six weeks in a Pennsylvania detention center, the government has quietly released one and is allowing the other to leave the country with her family… Many questions remain unanswered in a case that has been marked from the start by secrecy, including closed hearings, sealed FBI declarations, and orders barring attorneys from disclosing government information. [NYT, reprinted in Kansas City Star]

So that’s what happens under the USA FASCIST Act if you’re a 16-year-old Muslim girl who writes a school essay about Islam. Like Guantánamo Bay, you can be jailed without charges for life, and nobody will confirm that you exist. The same behavior by King George III sparked the American Revolution; the same behavior by Cuba, North Korea and Iran lands them on our various axes of evil.

Now what happens if you’re a bug-eyed, swastika-festooned, non-Muslim murderer with a criminal assault record, and you show up at the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw, slashing weapons and body armor?

You get served coffee and let into the U.S.

Have a nice day!

Gregory Allan Despres was supposed to be going to jail the morning folks spotted him hitchhiking to the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw. His trousers were spattered with blood. Inside his backpack he had a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife and brass knuckles. He was also packing pepper spray and wearing a bullet-proof vest… Mr. Despres… has a 10-inch swastika tattooed on his lower back… Mr. Young said the U.S. customs agents appeared to be joking around… “When I come back in (to the room) they were giving him a coffee,” he said. “He got processed faster than I did.” [Ottawa Citizen]

U.S. customs agents… let him into the United States… The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres’ hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton’s kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom… On the same day Despres crossed the border, he was due in a Canadian court to be sentenced on charges he assaulted and threatened to kill Fulton’s son-in-law, Frederick Mowat, last August. [CNN]

Previous posts: 1, 2

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The Lion, the Witch, the Wardrobe,…and some Indians

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I’m still a little upset that some hypersensitive individuals dared to criticize the Lord of the Rings as being “too white.” In my opinion that is just like saying that the Ramyana is “too brown.” In order to head off a future discussion along these lines I felt as if we should get it all out of our systems now. With that in mind I wanted to point out that the upcoming film The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe WILL have minorities in it, and YES, they will be beasts. Narniafans.com reports:

…several short Indian actors have been casted by Indian based casting director Sameer Bhardwaj for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Bhardwaj had earlier also helped in casting for The Lord of the Rings. The role of these actors is currently unknown, although speculation would lead us to believe that it is for many of the Talking Beast roles in the Chronicles of Narnia.

Well isn’t life a bitch? The casting director is Indian, and we’re still bound to get complaints. Not to fear though. Minorities have yet another chance in a Bhardwaj project (from last year): Continue reading →

Mirchi is more than a metaphor

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As snarky desis, we use mirchi constantly, in both our writing and our food. However, there is a human face to all this heat:

In temperatures of over 45 degrees, 80 year-old Rajima sits under an asbestos roof preparing chillies for export to Britain. For eight hours at a stretch her aching fingers pluck the stalks from the red chilli pods, releasing a pungent dust that fills her nose and throat making her cough and sneeze. For this, she earns 30 rupees, the equivalent of 40 pence, or less than a third of the cost of a small jar of chilli powder in a British supermarket. Rajima and her 50 co-workers are the hidden face of India’s spice trade. [BBC]

Think about the effects to Rajima’s health from all of this exposure to pepper. Pepper farmers and processors go through alot and earn very little:

Watching his produce weighed at Warangal market, one farmer complains that the 800 rupees he’s getting for each 40 kilo sack is too little to cover the growing costs. “I took huge loans for agricultural investment – mostly pesticides,” he says. “Now there will be no alternative for me but to commit suicide”. [BBC]

Furthermore, demand for pepper is down, due to a recent food scare concerning a food coloring carcinogenic additive. Bad weather has spoiled much of the Indian pepper crop, causing desi farmers to lose business to those in other countries. It’s a rough life for farmers from Andhra Pradesh.

According to state records, 4,500 farmers have killed themselves in the past seven years, driven to despair by poor harvests and financial worries, and that figure would be far higher if other family members were included. The epidemic of suicide started with cotton farmers but it is now spread to spice growers. Ironically, most die by swallowing the pesticides that have helped get them into debt.[BBC]

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