Monthly Archives: June 2005

As American as Gatka

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For the first time, the DC Independence day parade will include a gatka display, featuring the Miri Piri Gatka Dal (Texas) and the  Sikh Gatka Akhara (DC).

Gatka is a (the?) “Sikh Martial Art.”  A fighter swings his or her weapon (usually a stick, sword, or chain) in a fast, fluid, circular, flowing motion, while following a set footwork routine called the Panthra.  The result is both visually captivating and quite effective. Stylistically, gatka is more like kendo than fencing. Fencing was developed to train men for one-on-one duels; it’s linear and episodic, concentrating on lunges designed to penetrate armor. Gatka is designed so that one fighter can hold off multiple opponents and it relies upon continuous motion. The two fighting styles are different in all the stereotypical but true ways that East differs from West.

If you can’t make it, you might be interested looking at some video clips. My favorites include this one of a man with two swords, one man fighting multiple opponents, and this video-game style clip of two guys fighting. And yes, women do gatka as well [Windows Media Required].

At first I was concerned that the athletes demonstrating gatka would get a rude reception. After all, they’re swarthy, mainly male, dressed in salvar kameez, wearing round turbans. The men have long flowing beards. And this is the Fourth of July, a time for both patriotism and bigotry.

But I thought about it some more, and relaxed. After all, who would be dumb enough to mouth off to a bunch of Texans swinging swords like airplane propellers? Now that would be un-American.

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It’s not just the Catholic Church

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At the airport the other day a casually dressed man walked up to me in the security line and said, “you must be active duty or reserve.” Huh? “Excuse me” I politely replied. “Your haircut,” he pointed. Perhaps I had gotten it cut too short. I just love getting haircuts though. Having guessed wrong the man sheepishly walked off. Thirty seconds later he found a group of 3 young men and opened his suitcase to hand them something. Hare Krishna literature. The LA Times reported yesterday on an all to familiar story, but this one isn’t about the Catholic Church:

Leaders of the Hare Krishna faith last week began carrying out the terms of a $9.5-million settlement that closes the books on a long-running child abuse scandal.

Under the plan, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness organization has filed for bankruptcy in Los Angeles while it determines how to compensate 535 former students who say they were abused in the 1970s and ’80s by adults at boarding schools run by the society.

The settlement covers abuses at Krishna temples and schools across the United States and India that resulted in a 2001 class-action lawsuit.

Some Hare Krishna devotees and gurus, including at least one in Los Angeles, were subsequently convicted of child abuse, and others were barred from visiting temples, said Anuttama Dasa, spokesman for the society.

Of course, this isn’t an indictment against all Hare Krishnas, just as the entire Catholic Church isn’t on trial for the actions of some of its clergy, but it’s something to be aware of. There is actually a Hare Krishna temple on my block in LA. Once last year I heard blaring rock music outside my window. When I tried to discern the words I realized it was actually Hare Krishna rock.

Schools, known as ashram gurukulas, sprouted across the country, including Los Angeles.

“I hardly ever saw my parents, but when I did, I would ask my mother every two seconds, ‘What time do I have to go back?’ ” said plaintiff Anya Pourchot, now 37. “I was so fearful that if I did not get back to the ashram in time, they would take away my privileges of seeing my mother.”

Pourchot, a Santa Monica beautician, said she was able to fend off sexual advances from gurus, teachers and other devotees in a Dallas boarding school, but she was frequently beaten. She said she saw other children put inside gunnysacks and barrels as punishment. Children were locked in closets and told that rats would attack them if they moved, she said.

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Why Indians wear glasses

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topreaders.jpg

We already suspected this but now it’s official. The BBC reports on an accurate stereotype:

Indians are the world’s biggest bookworms, reading on average 10.7 hours a week, twice as long as Americans, according to a new survey. The NOP World Culture Score index surveyed 30,000 people in 30 countries from December 2004 to February 2005. Analysts said self-help and aspirational reading could explain India’s high figures. Britons and Americans scored about half the Indians’ hours and Japanese and Koreans were even lower – at 4.1 and 3.1 hours respectively.

That “self-help and aspirational reading” line is important. A lot of the reading being done is religious and scholastic and not necessarily independent reading like you’d think. Still, a bookstore in India is a “cool” place to hang out and be seen. Crosswords Bookstores are especially trendy.

R Sriram, chief executive officer of Crosswords Bookstores, a chain of 26 book shops around India, says Indians are extremely entrepreneurial and reading “is a fundamental part of their being”.

“They place a great deal of emphasis on reading. That’s the reason why they do well in education and universities abroad,” he told the BBC News website.

“People educate themselves and deal with change throughout their lives. And the way to do that is to update themselves with books.”

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What makes me swear

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In North Carolina, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is requesting that Muslim court witnesses be allowed swear their veracity with a Koran instead of a Bible:

Ellis said there is concern allowing the Koran could create new challenges. He questioned what would happen if a person claimed to worship brick walls and wanted to swear the oath on a brick. [WebIndia123]

They’re right. What if some lone wacko claimed to worship a stone, such as the Qa’aba, a shivalinga, a laughing Buddha or an engraved copy of the Ten Commandments? Blasphemy! I for one would be tempted to swear my oath upon The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Of course, since the scripture use is fairly ceremonial, you can already swear without your personal flavor of holy book, and people lie in court all the time, this isn’t exactly an earth-shattering issue. But it’s important to religious literalists who believe morality requires a warden-deity with night vision goggles.

So, taking the question at face value, it does in fact point to a larger issue of ownership. On one hand, it’s courteous to allow the majority religion its ceremonial religious invocations, which are woven throughout the Declaration of Independence, the currency, national holidays, the Pledge of Allegiance and the invocations of Congress and the Supreme Court. This religion and the work ethic it spawned built a great country over the years, and the American separation of church and state is reasonably good relative to most other nations. Those institutions are far more entangled on the subcontinent. Continue reading →

Digging for hidden treasure: searching for the origins of Balti and Tikka Masala

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Did you ever daydream about starring in a movie as an archeologist who ferrets out exotic treasures, the origins of which have been lost in the mists of antiquity? Well, get over it. Hollywood still has no idea how to cast brown people as anything other than terrorists, doctors, and occasionally taxi drivers or eaters of monkey brains. They’re not yet ready to make an Indian ANNA Jones movie, “M.Night” notwithstanding.

Instead, I offer you a far geekier and more glorious pursuit! The BBC and OED have teamed up to find the earliest verifiable usage of words from the unimaginatively titled “BBC Wordhunt appeal list” for the next version of the OED. If you can beat their earliest recorded usage (you need some form of dated evidence) your contribution might be featured as part of a new BBC2 TV series. How’s that for 15 minutes of fame?

Two of the fifty words on their list (4%!) are words of BritAsian origin:

balti
Wanted: printed evidence before 1984; information on the word’s origin

Are you one of Britain’s original curry kings or queens? If so, did you cook or serve Britain or the world’s first balti — or do you know who did? Knocking around at the back of the kitchen drawer do you have an old takeaway menu with a balti on it from before 1984?

The winter issue of Curry Magazine (1984) contains the first printed evidence the OED has for ‘balti’. But where the term comes from (India, Pakistan — perhaps Baltistan) remains something of a mystery at present. They say it first appeared in the Birmingham area in the early 80s. But is there any printed evidence for the term earlier, and can the origin be confirmed?

See the OED entry for balti

tikka masala
Wanted: printed evidence before 1975

Restaurant menus and reviews start to show chicken tikka masala from 1975, according to the latest research from the OED. Despite the dish’s claim to be a great British national dish, the first recorded evidence comes from America. Something wrong here? Or not?

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Jailing “witnesses” indefinitely

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Last year I blogged about the Justice Department’s abuse of material witness statutes following 9/11. For over a year HRW lawyer Anjana Malhotra has been flying around the country interviewing those thrown into jail indefinitely as “material witnesses,” to terrorist activities. Now a full report [Witness to Abuse: Human Rights Abuses under the Material Witness Law since September 11] has just been released on this practice. Newsweek reports:

Since 9/11, the Justice Department has used a little-known legal tactic to secretly lock up at least 70 terror suspects—almost all of them Muslim men—and hold them without charges as “material witnesses” to crimes, in some cases for months. A report to be released this week by two civil-liberties groups finds nearly 90 percent of these suspects were never linked to any terrorism acts, resulting in prosecutors and FBI agents issuing at least 13 apologies for wrongful arrest.

The report cites instances in which agents used what it calls “flimsy” evidence to make arrests. A 68-year-old Virginia doctor named Tajammul Bhatti was arrested by the FBI in June 2002 after neighbors found magazines about flying and a phone number of a Pakistani nuclear scientist in his apartment. It turned out he had served in the U.S. Air Force National Guard and the Pakistani scientist was a childhood friend. Another “tip” led to the arrest of eight restaurant workers in Evansville, Ind., who were shackled and taken to a detention facility in Chicago. The FBI later apologized—but never disclosed the basis for their detention. “The law was never designed to be used this way,” says Anjana Malhotra, the prime author of the report.

The New York Times has more:

The new study sought to catalogue and quantify the treatment of the witnesses, and it found that a third of the 70 material witnesses it identified were jailed for at least two months. The study found that there might well have been more than 70 material witnesses, but secrecy provisions prevented a definitive tally. Of the 70 who were positively identified, 42 were released without any charges being filed, 20 were charged with non-terrorist offenses like bank or credit card fraud, four were convicted of supporting terrorism, and three others are awaiting trial on terrorism charges. More than a third were ultimately deported. None are still known to be held as witnesses.

Few of the material witnesses made national headlines. Among the notable exceptions were Zacarias Moussaoui, recently convicted of terrorism in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks; Jose Padilla, who was later declared an enemy combatant after authorities accused him of plotting to build a “dirty bomb;” and Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim lawyer in Portland who was jailed in connection with the 2004 Madrid train bombings after the F.B.I. mistakenly matched a fingerprint of his to the scene.

NPR features this on Monday as well.

[disclosure: Malhotra is a friend] Continue reading →

Posted in Law

Dum Dum Thievery (updated)

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Thievery Corporation and Gunjan from Bally Sagoo’s label roll into a radio studio for a hypnotic, downtempo version of ‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram‘ (thanks, Arun and Turbanhead). A later song in this video reminds me of the velvety Bebel Gilberto. Watch the video.

Whoah, these serious-faced sitarists and tabla players look way less edgy than their music. Especially when it’s the soundtrack at a chill lounge with a good rioja at hand. Then again, have you seen Bollywood playback singers? I guess I virtually expect rental silicone in the age of the Black Eyed Peas.

These next two rockin’ videos came out last year (inspired by Amardeep’s quiz). First up is Dum Dum Project with the punny-named ‘Punjabi 5-0.’ There are shades of ‘Mundian To Bach Ke‘ in the image mix, it’s much grittier overall than a Bally Sagoo video. The faux lesbian, Asian-exotic groping is very Robert Palmer. An infamous fashion-mashin’ lookalike makes an appearance. Watch the video.

In ‘Supafly Bindi,’ DDP samples ‘OPP,’ which is so acro-apropos. The video rips Soul Train, but the hook is catchy as hell. Watch the video.

More on DDP:

DDP started in my bedroom studio, Lower East Side, NY and now it’s got “branches” in London, Bangkok, and Bombay…

… I love the name of the group. How did you all come up with it?… Took it right off the back of a bunch of old Hindi film records: Dum Dum-India.

… How did… The1Shanti… come to be a part of the troupe?… I discovered him rhyming for loose change at the Atlantic Ave. subway station in Brooklyn.

Update: Here’s the kicker: the group’s founder, Sean Dinsmore a.k.a. DJ Cavo, isn’t desi. And his India story reads like a breathless backpacker’s. Just how badass is this guy that he can just walk into a musical subculture and start innovating? Continue reading →

Terrorist tech support

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This tech support parody (warning: sound) has a wild-eyed Sikh wearing an Afghan-style turban surrounded by Hindu icons in southern India (thanks, Avi). The usual bad Indian accent and cow jokes ensue. I supposed we should thank the animator for drawing him in an office instead of squatting on the ground with an abacus. Its dissection of brainless tech support is pretty cute, though.

Screwy Flash animations shouldn’t be politically correct, but they shouldn’t be ignorant either. Team America knowingly poked fun at American stereotyping even while engaging in it, by putting together a Middle Eastern disguise for the protagonist. The ‘disguise’ consisted of stray bits of toilet paper stuck to his jawline and brownface splashed on as if by a 2-year-old. That’s about how well Americans understand the Middle East, the movie was saying.

This animation doesn’t do that — it cheaps out with crude, wildly inaccurate ethnic stereotypes. I’m not saying don’t poke fun at desis. Hell, we do it all the time. I’m saying: Ill Will Press, this creative work is trite and lame. Get it right next time. There are a quarter million of us right in your backyard, the second-largest Asian-American group in NYC, so just ask somebody.

Granted, it might be a strained conversation (‘Say, dude, fact-check this animation and do a bad accent so I can make fun of your country of origin’)… 🙂

Related posts: 1, 2, 3

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“It’s easy, it’s easy”

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Since I myself am a teaching assistant in the sciences I had to jump on this article in the New York Times. Almost everyone whose ever been to college has had some experience with a TA they just couldn’t understand.

Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade.

The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked.

“He would just say, ‘It’s easy, it’s easy,’ ” said Ms. Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley. “But it wasn’t easy. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but he couldn’t communicate in English.”

Ms. Serrin’s experience is hardly unique. With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the last two decades, undergraduates at large research universities often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete.

There are several issues here in addition to the focus of the article. First, I have no doubt that Ms. Serrin deserved a C. Foreign TA’s are tougher because they are used to expecting more from their students and don’t understand that grade inflation is the norm in the U.S. This is especially true in the sciences. I have to inflate grades all the time, even at a top rated University like the one I attend. A friend of mine, who is now a Post-doc, told me that when he first came from India he was a mean and ruthless TA because that is what he thought a TA was supposed to be like. He didn’t understand why the students were so sensitive. Continue reading →

And you thought your nephew/niece’s name was bad

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This unfortunate baby was born on February 22, 2005 in the tiny little town of Roseburg, Oregon (Population 21,000). Why do I say that she’s unfortunate? It has nothing to do with the dress she’s wearing, that’s really not her fault. And all babies look like boiled aloo when they’re born. Nor was she born too small or too large; at 9 lbs 3 oz, she’s well within normal parameters.

The unfortunate thing about this baby is her name: Aryan Justice. This poor little girl is going to have to go through life with the name of a political cause that frankly, hasn’t been on the winning side of many battles lately. Probably the last time the Aryans won anything was when they invaded India, thousands of years ago. They would have been better off naming her “Christian Right” (assuming they shared those values, many Aryan Nation folks are Pagans [NSFW], and talk about the “brutal dictatorship of Christian tyrants” [NSFW]), at least then she could have been called “Chrissie” by her schoolmates.

Also, it’s unfortunate this this girl looks so … well … tan. She looks more like she fits the earlier definition of Aryan as “Indo-Iranian” than the revisionist definition of “blue eyed, blond haired, supremacist puke.”

Lastly, I love the hospital’s little helpful name explanation guide. Aryan, they tell us, is a name of French origin, and means Holy. Riiiiiiiight. And if you believe that, I have a Reich to sell you. Here’s hoping that this poor baby grows up at least as sane as Moon Unit and Dweezil Zappa ……

UPDATE: Runnerwallah points out that the name was no mistake [NSFW], and that her parents really are White Supremacists. I hope she tells people it’s pronounced “Arianne”, and that her parents named her after the European space program. Then she can move to India when she grows up, where her name isn’t so unusual, and marry somebody of her own skin tone.

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