Two people are dead and 115 people remain injured after 350 bombs detonated in or around government buildings all over Bangladesh today. (Thanks, Rahul.) The explosions which were apparently the work of Islamic militant group Jamayetul Mujahedin affected 63 of the country’s 64 districts. [link]
The bombs exploded in rapid succession between 10:30 and 11:30 in the morning, local time. From the BBC:
…timing devices were found at the scenes of blasts but most of the bombs were small, homemade devices – wrapped in tape or paper.
One of the deaths was a young boy in Savar, near Dhaka, who was killed when he picked up a device. [link]
The group responsible for the blasts was banned by the Bangladeshi government earlier this year; previously, the government had insisted that Bangladesh didn’t have a problem with Islamic Militancy, so this policy change was significant.
Leaflets from the Jamatul Mujahideen Bangladesh have appeared at the site of some of the blasts.
“It is time to implement Islamic law in Bangladesh” and “Bush and Blair be warned and get out of Muslim countries”, the leaflets say. [link]
Developing…
this world has gone MAD
This is sad stuff. Goes back to what Abhi was talking about yesterday – all the copycat multi-explosions, suicide bombings , brainwashed speech about iraq, ummah etc.
It is just a matter of time for attacks like these to happen in Indian cities. The underworld network/Islamic fundamentalism (violent one) runs rampant in Indian cities too – not just Bangladesh and Pakistan. Moreover, they have assistance from some Bangladeshi fundamentalists who crossover to India for daytime jobs and “other stuff”.
WHERE is the news coverage on this?? I was just on the WashPost site….nothing. ‘Car bombs rock Baghdad’ – and what else is new?
After a quick flip through my news sites, I can’t believe this isn’t “bigger” news.
maisnon, NY TIMES HAS IT
Silly 🙂 they world has always been MAD
Yes, you would think since it’s brown+muslim that it would get the attention of everyone, and used for political purposes. But don’t forget no one white was killed, so it doesn’t really matter all that much…
My mom heard about it online this AM, but she didn’t have much details on it. We have a few relatives who work for the govt over there…
Worse attacks (Bombay Stock Exchange Bombings) have taken place in Indian cities before. Something like this with very few casualties wouldn’t be too bad.
Yep, it is a tragedy only if there are white lives at stake.
Yep, it is a tragedy only if there are white lives at stake.
there is some truth to this, though i think the racial angle has to be supplemented by the first world/nationality angle (and i think the racial angle is less important than in the past). but why is that a big deal? here at SM brown lives get a big deal of play. the casualty count was low. more people probably die in niger in 10 minutes than will die of this bombing.
Excellent point Razib. I’d even take it further. Perhaps more people will die in places like Niger just this week of non-terrorism related causes, than will die in all the terrorist attacks we at SM will write about in the whole next year. It is fascinating to me how television and media can alter the perceptions of people, myself included, to not always see this fact.
More than the number of lives that were taken, I find the number of bombs, that were timed close to each other, to be chilling.
Can you imagine what 350 bombs could mean if those weren’t amateur bombs?
abhi writes:Perhaps more people will die in places like Niger just this week of non-terrorism related causes, than will die in all the terrorist attacks we at SM will write about in the whole next year.
And more people will die of Cancer than in places like Niger. And more people will die of AIDS than due to Cancer. And more people will die of traffic accidents than due to Caner. And more people will die of boredom listening to Michael Moore’s raves and rants.
So, let’s tackle MM first. //sarcasm off
AIDS, Cancer, Niger, Poverty, traffic accidents etc are not caused intentionally by a set of people to kill another set of people.
Terrorism, on the other hand, is willfully caused by a set of people with an intention to kill. Hence, that’s more dangerous and needs to be tackled first, even though the number of people killed is smaller.
M. Nam
Excellent rebuttal, Moornam. If we are going to play the comparison game, we might as well give up. Why do we have to compare them? What does that rhetorical flourish accomplish? Cynically saying, “X people have it worse…” may be true but it’s irrelevant.
Stop and think about it. Can you even imagine several hundred bombs going off around you? If that had happened in London, we wouldn’t hear the end of it. I’m very disturbed by some of the comments like
written in response to the question, What if this had occured in India? What is up with this selective concern?
Explain to me why that isn’t a subjective statement? I don’t see it. I think number of people killed is as good a metric as any, no?
I’m not saying terrorism isn’t an important issue. All I was saying is that Razib made a good point about how perception=importance.
Give what up?
If that had happened in London, we wouldn’t hear the end of it. I’m very disturbed by some of the comments like
let’s hope we wouldn’t hear the end of it. look, i was visiting family in bangladesh in june of 2004. it’s a messed up country. there was a general strike by one of the major political parties, and when some people went to work, the political goons decided to burn a bus filled with people (my uncle is a gov. functionary and in a supervisory position, so he had to go to work, so we were concerned about this issue). you didn’t see that in the news. now, if bangladeshi islamists were going to build 350 shitty bombs in london, or new york, or fill in the blank, i’d be pretty fucking concerned. as it is, it’s bangladesh, who cares? bangladeshis do, and it is certainly in their media, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not an important country. the GIA has been slaughtering people (now less) for 15 years now in algeria. wackjobs wander egypt killing people. in thailand malay separatists are beheading buddhist kufirs. happens everyday everyway.
my response was motivated by the calls of “hey, whitey isn’t paying attention because whitey isn’t being killed.” of course not, why should westerners weight terrorism in the third world when it is half way toward banality there? the only relevance is a connection to terrorism in the west, and as it is, bangladeshi terrorists are, i suspect, a minimal threat right now to the west (the bangladeshis in britain aren’t as assimilated so they haven’t become as alienated, if you get what i mean-i suspect some of do know what i mean, and on a personal level from what i can gather).
so cut the knee jerk cries of racism out i say, it’s hypocritical, especially on a blog devoted to south asiancentric concerns. if you want ‘white people’ to pay attention to brown people, well, go comment on ‘white weblogs’ about this topic and stop bitching a weblog self consciously focused on browns about how white people consciously focus on their own concerns.
Setting aside for a moment that this is an “I’m right because I’m right” argument, even the premises don’t stand up. A lot of these so-called “natural” disasters have a human element to them too. There’s an international system that has some countries that are extremely wealthy and powerful and others that aren’t and this is built on many things, including racism, colonialism, meddling, military intervention, and other things that impeded societies from really being free. Wealthy and powerful countries tend to act in their own interests and do things like installing shahs, killing Allendes, maintaining Eastern European satellite states, having proxy wars, selling arms, imposing economic ideologies on them, and otherwise creating circumstances that make it harder for society to deal with eventual “natural disasters”. Where the money goes always tells the real story.
So we’re not allowed to talk about possible racism/nationality/”importance” bias in the media? We’re not allowed to question why a missing teenager in Aruba got a million times more coverage than the famine in Niger, why coverage on the tsunami was slow to pick up, simply because we’re on a space that caters to brown people?
Maybe racism isn’t the right lens to look at this through (although it is a component, I think), but there’s a situation with the media in the US and it’s 1) a problem in and of itself and 2) has damaging effects on American society by encouraging parochialism–which we can see reflected anytime foreign issues have an effect here.
btw, i think it’s fair game to direct the same criticism at identity spaces like SM.
why should westerners weight terrorism in the third world when it is half way toward banality there?
Exactly. Brutality, starvation, murder, famine, and disease in the undeveloped world is just a lot less unusual than in the first world. And the news is about what’s unusual and newsworthy, not what’s unsurprising.
In a very real sense, Muslims blowing stuff up in South Asian is less surprising than them blowing stuff up in North American or Europe. They’ve been doing it in the former place for longer, so only real “spectaculars” — like 350 simultaneous bombings — make the Western media.
The penny ante wages of Islam in Islamic countries — a beheading here, an honor killing there — don’t make the news because they aren’t news.
And as for Africa — well, jeez, the number of countries on that continent that aren’t failed states is less than those that are. Again, not newsworthy. A country in sub-Saharan Africa that wasn’t a disaster area would be newsworthy, but odds are we’ll be waiting a long time for that headline…
in South Asian…North American
aagh, should be “South Asia” and “North America” above.
btw, i think it’s fair game to direct the same criticism at identity spaces like SM.
you aren’t the object of my criticism because you moot this last issue all the time. there are people on these boards who have a sharp focus on brown issues, and verge on brown (often hindu) chauvinism. i don’t particularly mind their brownocentric attitude, some of them are FOBs so they have a bigger stake that normal (though i feel entitled to point out that many american browns don’t subscribe to this viewpoint and those who do shouldn’t be surprised that there are people out there like us). but, i get really tired of them acting all shocked that westerners, and whites, might be guilty of the same chauvinism. i’m a american chauvinist to some extent, i admit it. i’m not going to bitch and cry that indians, or nigerians, or etc. etc. have a concern about their own people.
there is a certain type who apologizes for shariah (and dhimmititude) in the muslim world while arguing strenuously for civil liberties in the west. there is a type that pushes foward apologia for the RSS and hindu nationalism in brownland but bitches and moans about how racist and stereotyping americans are. i can’t brook that crap.
because we’re on a space that caters to brown people?
It’s not just a space that caters to brown people, it’s a place that believes the lives and deaths of browns are more notable — and tacitly more important — than those of whites, blacks, or other groups. That’s reflected in the coverage, which doesn’t cover Columbian narco-terrorism or the latest Liberian massacre, but does cover Islamic terrorism, outsourcing, and the terrible indignities suffered by “Turbanhead” 🙂
The focus is “South Asian” — not Indian/American/Pakistani, not Hindu/Muslim, and not English/Hindi/Punjabi. That is, the focus here is race, not nationality, religion, culture, or language…except insofar as they intersect with race.
Given this avowedly racialist focus, it’s unseemly to complain about the nationalistic biases of the mainstream media and conflate them with the racialistic biases in coverage that are overtly on display here. You know, mote in thine eye and all that jazz.
p.s. of course, that does not imply that civil liberties are bad or that stereotyping and racism is good. i am less concerned about the issues that some types concern themselves with (ie; in the case of some muslim radicals, campaigning for the freedom to destroy freedom to all intents) as i am with the hypocrisy. hypocrisy is human, but so is pointing out its odiousness.
It’s actually shared culture.
Your argument is inside-out. The raison d’etre of a desi site is that the mainstream media doesn’t cover these things. It’s almost tautological– complaining about media bias flows naturally into providing a different view.
It’s actually shared culture.
What culture do Raj Bhakta and the Bangladeshi bombers share?
Culture defined so broadly is operationally equivalent to race. I mean, don’t get me wrong…given GNXP I’m hardly one to say that race isn’t worthy of attention. I’m just saying that chastising the newsmedia’s ostensible parochialism from the confines of a brown-centered blog is much like La Raza criticizing others for racism.
and for the record, i’m not pointing fingers at everyone here, otherwise i’d point fingers at myself. i appreciate SM for the window it gives me on what some brown people, who tend to live not in brownload, are computer literate, literate, etc. etc. think.
but, that being said
1) i don’t think this event, ipso facto, is necessarily newsworthy. the 350 bombs is noteworthy, but, they seem to have been rather shitty. the death count seems pretty low (this in a country where 120,000 have died in natural disasters in the past generation). the coordination was impressive, but i think that is relevant only in the case of bangladesh since i don’t think a cognate network of islamists exists in the west.
2) so, i think that the charge that ‘whites weren’t killed so no one cares’ is knee jerk. obviously white bodies do count more, as do rich bodies, western bodies, american bodies, etc. in the western media. but i’ve seen intense narrow-focus arguments blow-up on these message boards which indicate no one here is (aside from perhaps saurav) is really committed to the mohist project of universal love and concern.
let me end with a ‘big picture’ concern that i always have. i have heard the argument from many non-whites, black, brown yellow, etc. that they feel excluded and alienated from the majority white culture. they share cultural similarities and affinities with people ‘like them’ (there isn’t a check list definition of ‘like us’ as the disputes about south asian vs. non-south asian, etc. etc. indicate). but the flip side of this is that withdrawl because of perceptions and experiences of exclusion will result in a homogenization of social circles, white and non-white, which will perpetuation alienation and stereotypes (in my opinion). there isn’t an easy answer to this. but i think it’s out there, i am willing to give whites more slack about being whitocentric because is see how many non-whites (not me, but i live in a world where my own concerns, and secondarily my girlfriends, are basically all that exists) get comfort from being ‘around their own kind’ (and no, i don’t think it is solely a function of ‘push’ factors, there is a lot of ‘pull’ too).
gc, I think you’re being unfair here. I agree that there’s a conflation often made between sharing a cultural and racial identity by some here, but there’s clearly an educated, American desi, middle class or uppwardly mobile, professional, identity-focused vibe to the blogging that happens here–at least in the posts (and I argue that the posts frame the space although they’re not hte only thing). Part of this perspective, in my opinion, is omission of exactly how narrow the identity I described above is and that leads to a kind of hegemonization–in which that identity is never articulated and “brown” or “desi” or “South Asian” is substituted instead. What Raj Bhakta and Bangladeshi bombings have in common is that they may be thought to be of interest to people who fit the description I described.
American desi, middle class or uppwardly mobile, professional, identity
well, without a poll or anything to back it up all you have are your impressions. right? 🙂
i think a better analogy than white nationalism for what goes on here is probably being italian american. by definition (usually) being italian means being white (and of italian descent), but it is fundamentally defined by cultural and historical parameters, race is just a prior conditional.
i also think the italian american identity is apropos because most italian americans have origins in the southern part of the peninsula, and a large number are sicilian, and they are likely not aware of the importance of regionalism in their ancestral “homeland” (past the 2nd generation). the hostility of northern italians (which, by some measures, is the wealthiest part of europe) to those from the south, and especially sicily, is in my experience far greater than that between southerners and yankees. a close friend who lives in the milan area has a father who was born in sicily, but she’s never been to sicily and has never visited her relatives there (she’s 40). my girlfriend told me not to mention that i know about her sicilian heritage to her since i was almost about to ask about the pesto vs. tomato sauce issue relating to north-south and where she stood.
anyway, that was a long-winded way to say that italian american identity is something new worldish, without old world cognates, though it derives from old world antecedants. the people here remind me of the same sort of thing, though i also do sense the ‘hegemonization’ that saurav is talking about. the occasional tifs between FOBs (and FOB-lites who seem to identify more with brownland than amerika) and the more manishesh (for lack of a better word) types over ‘south asian’ is i think simply evidence of the distance developing between the new world south asian identity and the old world regional-religious sensibilities. the assimilation of muslim browns into a muslim, as opposed to south asian, identity is i think another part of the puzzle.
This is off track but I remembered talk over lack of UCC in India sometime back when I read about this ban
Sorry…I should have been more precise–I was referring to the perspectives I feel are coming from the bloggers themselves, not the overall space. But yes, I haven’t conducted a poll on the demographics of Manish, Abhi, Ennis, Anna, Amardeep, et. al.–just impressions, conversations, (and some deductions based on who generally has time to blog 🙂
If you have to ask, what was the point of reading SM for the last year?
You might as well diss Consumer Reports for critiquing bad automakers. SM exists because the MSM does a shitty job covering the things that interest us. It’s SM’s reason for being, its differentiator, its inspiration. In a land of Andrew Sullivan and DailyKos, there’s no need for yet another mainstream political blog– and in contrast, some of the things we write about are burning to be written.
Saurav, you’re under some illusion that this blog is a monopoly and/or has the duty to be representative. We’re not the government. Nobody wants to read corporatespeak riddled with a thousand disclaimers. We have distinct points of view. Part of that tone (literate, American) is by design, part of it is intrinsic to who we are. Nobody on this blog is trying to appropriate the authenticity that you don’t have.
Nobody on this blog is trying to appropriate the authenticity that you don’t have.
cringe man, that was a real good one liner. props.
400 bombs, on one day, in one country, by Muslim extremists preaching neo-Talibanism is newsworthy no matter where you are . Even in terms of strict self-interest, it behooves counterterrorism people to investigate the new tactics. That this barely made a ripple on U.S. news sites is ridiculously bad judgment.
400 bombs, on one day, in one country, by Muslim extremists preaching neo-Talibanism is newsworthy no matter where you are . Even in terms of strict self-interest, it behooves counterterrorism people to investigate the new tactics. That this barely made a ripple on U.S. news sites is ridiculously bad judgment.
funny, just talked to my mom. she had no idea what i was talking about when i mentioned it 🙂 anyway, the deaths are 10 last i checked. i think you need to break into triple digits in a non-iraq third world story to get play.
what was the point of reading SM for the last year?
the point of reading sm? simply that there are plenty of left wing south asians in the US who would purport to speak for me. I want to keep tabs on what they’re saying in my name, and from time to time register my dissent.
If you have to ask,
Humor me. I do have to ask. What culture do Bhakta and the bombers share?
Covering the people with genetic ancestry from the Subcontinent all over the world is a worthy task for a blog. But let’s not pretend that Bobby Jindal, Raj Bhakta, MIA, Shezad Tanweer, Daler Mehndi, and a pack of Bangladeshi Islamic fundamentalists have anything in common besides their continental-scale race. They certainly don’t share the same language, nationality, ethnicity, political leanings, religious beliefs… or culture.
400 bombs, on one day, in one country, by Muslim extremists preaching neo-Talibanism is newsworthy no matter where you are . Even in terms of strict self-interest, it behooves counterterrorism people to investigate the new tactics. That this barely made a ripple on U.S. news sites is ridiculously bad judgment.
I actually concur 100% with this assessment, but I think the lack of a ripple is for a different reason — in addition to the newsworthiness filters mentioned above, the newsmedia tends to suppress stories of Islam-behaving-badly unless it really can’t avoid it.
That is, I don’t think the relative lack of coverage in Western media (though the NYT did cover it) is due to a lack of sympathy for brown lives, but rather due to a misguided equivalence between “fundamentalist Muslim” and “brown”…an equivalence that the “South Asian” label, AALDEF, and plenty of left of center Indian Americans all (unfortunately) tend to propagate.
What Raj Bhakta and Bangladeshi bombings have in common is that they may be thought to be of interest to people who fit the description I described.
Granted, but why? I submit it is because these are the deeds of people who look like us, and society’s perception of us is partially predicated on their actions…and our response to their actions.
“South Asian” “mutiny” “desi” “brown” “punk.” If you don’t want to live up to your own self-definition, pick better words or stop replicating all the power dynamics already plaguing desi communities.
You could stay by adding an entertaining disclaimer to your FAQ!
“We are a desi blog; however, we feel no obligation to even attempt to represent the following perspectives:
working class people; LGBT people; people in South Asia; Indo-Caribbeans; British Asians or members of other diasporas; 1st generation South Asian immigrants; noncitizens; people who believe in mutinies; people who are actually punk; people who we decided are South Asian but don’t identify as such; people who are mixed race; and non-Indian-Americans.
But really, we swear, we are a desi blog.”
Looking forward to your next witty potshot.
stop replicating all the power dynamics already plaguing desi communities.
Saurav, please see the promo poster for this new movie. I think it hits every one of the
quotastargets on your list…stop replicating all the power dynamics already plaguing desi communities.
Those pesky little power dynamics! What with their ridiculous resilience, one would think they were an ineradicable part of human nature or something…
hence the need to try to actively mitigate their effects…
More seriously…
Saurav, Manish and I have our differences. Boy, do we have our differences.
But one thing I’d like to think we have in common is that we don’t front. We’re not concerned about how “authentic” our various overlapping identities are. I’m not ashamed to be an upper middle class college educated Indian American, and I doubt Manish is either. We earned this shit.
What’s more, we’re the mainstream. The marginal subgroups you had to hunt and peck to assemble are clearly just totems to you. You don’t actually care about them; you don’t actually know anything about them. You’re just using them as hastily gathered objects of conspicuous compassion, ways to push off on the rest of us to show how decent and moral you are relative to us unfeeling brutes.
But the jig’s up. Fact is — contra what your sociology teacher told you — moral status is not a function of identity. The fact that a working class household has one less TV on average than a middle class household does not make them worse people…but it certainly doesn’t make them better people either! There is absolutely no moral compunction — none — to devote coverage to people just because they’re “marginal” by some tendentious definition.
PS: an offhand reference to “punk” in the faq does not represent a committment to cover the miniscule SA punk culture…next we’ll hear about how Abhi’s reneging on his promise to cover the bumping bhangra scene of North Dakota…
Saurav’s last amusing comment aside — taking this back to the main topic here — there hasn’t been very much media coverage of the bombs in Bangladesh here in the UK either. I expected to see “Breaking News” on the Sky News channel, along with BBC News, and of course CNN etc, but there was nothing at all (apart from teletext news on CNN).
Various arguments have already been bounced back and forth here on SM, but I wonder if one of the main reasons is actually the relatively small number of fatalities. Either way, the lack of coverage is still surprising, considering the huge number of bombs that were detonated.
Kind regards, Jai, London
well, rezwanul in dhaka is trying to talk about it. he says that bombs exploded in 63 out of 64 sites. the death toll is not bad, 10ish from what i’ve read. not to trivialize it, but this kind of seems like a publicity stunt on the part of islamists. i mean, their bombs were shit, but they showed the world their organizational capabilities, if not their technical chops.
Ok now lets get back to the Natalie Hollaway story. Any new leads ? (Sarcasm overload)
Speaking of Natalie did anybody else notice those two dudes with Indian names ? Are they Arubans of Indian origin or actually Indians in Aruba ?
The only way the mainstream media will cover the BDesh story is if some european looking super model twisted her ankle because of the bomb blasts in BDesh.
All speculations true – Islamic fundamentalism finally arrives in Kolkata.
The dudes are from Suriname . 37% of the population has Indian origins. It is interesting to hear their mother back them up with “They are good Indian (hindu?) boys they would never do such a thing”
OK fair enough, but how do you think the dynamics (ossification of a new world identity) change when there is near frictionless flow of information, people, money, relationships across the ‘old’ world and the ‘new world’. Esp for a lot of people on this blog who tend to be mobile (in a real or virtual sense). The sicilian example you have given is pretty much one way, people cross the ocean and are done. Nobody wants to go back. Time passes distance develops, italian american vs sicilians etc. But now, you see korean second gen kids go over to Seoul to create the ‘new’ old world. Mumbai kids who are soaked deeply in the US culture represent the ‘old’ new world. Second gen indians who relocate and work in Bangalore for a few years. Indians who work in the US for ten years and go back etc. etc. People soak up information on the “contra” identity all the time.
I don’t see the fuss in ther NYTimes not covering BDesh. SepiaMutiny isn’t writing about the popular revolt in the Maldives (despite its ‘south asian’ status.) People write about what interests them and newspaper publish things that interest their readers.
Look at the Gaza withdrawal. 8,500 people forced to move — more people live on a single Manhattan block. It’s a pittance. But the NYT covers it like D-Day, and has a feature where you can look at individual houses in Gaza (Real estate, Cheap!).
Abhi,
No. The number of people that could be killed is the best metric.
If one of these days these terrorists get hold of nuclear/biological weapons, it’s all over for the world as we know it. They will use it with devastating consequences, killing probably tens of millions. Economies will go bust. Hunger, starvation, disease will be rampant. Hundreds of millions, if not more, will be affected. Far more than AIDS, Cancer, traffic accidents etc put together.
Hence, pay more importance to curb terrorism, even if means taking away funds from Niger, AIDS etc.
Now, if there emerges a bigger threat than islamic terrorism, I would tackle that first. If say, astronomers detect an asteroid that would hit earth in a few years, killing off all life, then I would say, forget islamic terrorism, let’s tackle the asteroid first.
Saurav,
Saurav, Saurav, Saurav… was that really necessary?
I certainly agree. Niger is that way not only because of decades of colonial looting, but also because their tribal belief systems from forcibly supplanted with alien faiths like Islam and Christianity. Their tribal beliefs had helped them live of the land without affecting their environment since the begining of time. When that was obliterated, the knowledge of how to live in harmony with nature was also obliterated. Hence the present predicament…
You have the cause and effect backwards. Countries that act in their own interests become wealthy and powerful. So do individuals.
I was really pissed about this. There were 20+ searchers for more than two weeks, in a foreign country, looking for a lost girl. Me thinks it was only because she was white and middle-class. If she were a non-white, it would not have been on the CNN front page for a week. Come to think of it, it would not have been on CNN at all.
M. Nam
(cont from above)
You can’t blame the Times — New Yorkers are interested in Gaza. They don’t care about skinny-assed Bangladeshis.
SepiaMutiny is actually slightly more misrepresentative — it gives the impression of being a South Asian diaspora blog (according to the FAQ). But there’s not much on Vancouver, Toronto, Guyana, Trinidad, Fiji. PK, BDesh, etc are discussed from an Indian perspective. (It isn’t terribly punk either, despite the photo in the FAQ). As Manish says,
SM exists because the MSM does a shitty job covering the things that interest us.
The tag-line should, more honestly be ‘The world, mostly from an Indian-American perspective’. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. A few fix-ups to the FAQ, and you’ll have truth in advertising. And a lot fewer whinging commentors.
Dude, why all these heated arguments about what individuals SHOULD blog about? Why all the identity politics? For heaven’s sake, if you’re not interested in a particular story, DON’T FREAKING CLICK ON IT! Why spend your energy whining about how you don’t think Indian Hindus are like Bangladeshi extremists or like left-wing American desis?
What do a British Sri Lankan raised in a white neighborhood and a British Punjabi raised in brown Hounslow have in common? I dunno, but Bobby and Nihal have a popular radio show, and make jokes about ALL South Asian cultures while promoting Asian music no matter where it’s from. The Asian Underground music scene in the 90s was populated by British representatives of ALL of the subcontinent and diaspora (State of Bengal=Bangladeshi, Equal-i=Indo-Caribbean, Talvin=Sikh Indian, Fun-Da-Mental=Pakistani, etc etc), and I guess they were too busy making music and art to be as focused on identity politics as today’s blogerati. For some people, perhaps being brown in a white-majority country is enough to find common ground to build on. Maybe for some of you guys it’s not.
I read this blog because my partner is brown, my boss is brown, my friends are brown, and I couldn’t avoid brown people in London even if I tried, so I’ve developed an interest in brown issues. What country their parents were from doesn’t seem to be so much of an issue between them.
There’s LOADS of stuff to read on the web. You have the freedom to click on only the things you want to know more about, you know. 😉