Monthly Archives: August 2005

I Prefer That You Kiss My…

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Also, I urgently require that you not be so “Jim Crow” (Thanks, Al Mujahid).
This is outrageous, y’all:

Posted On : 17 August 2005

URGENTLY REQUIRED

A leading company in the automotive business requires the following personnel to be located in Abu Dhabi and Beda Zayed city branch

DIESEL MECHANICS
ELECTRICIANS
MECHANICS
PAINTERS
DENTERS
LIGHT & HEAVY DRIVERS

Applicants should have a relative Diploma with minimum 3 years experience in Automobiles industry.

UAE D/L is a must for drivers.

Indians are not preferred to apply.

Fax: 02-6767708
P.O Box 29699 Abu Dhabi

Just one more reason why it’s a part of the world I’m not fond of…the minuscule silver lining is, less jobs for brown people means less brown people in the gulf, which means less stories like this. Continue reading →

The Savannahs of America

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A couple of days ago the New York Times had an interview with Dr. Ullas Karanth, a wildlife biologist/conservationist from India who is desperately trying to save the tiger from extinction (thanks for the tip Yamini):

Dr. Karanth, 57, was in New York on a recent summer afternoon to attend a conference at the Bronx Zoo, a subsidiary of the conservation society, on the future of tigers in the wild. In a break in the proceedings, he spoke of his favorite feline.

Q. Do we know how many wild tigers still exist in India?

A. We don’t. The government claims that there are over 3,000. But that figure is based on a flawed counting method that officials developed for themselves. There are preservation groups who claim the number is more like 1,000. It’s probably not that low.

We believe that if India is to have tigers, these wildlife reserves must be rigorously protected.

Josh Dolan of Cornell University publishes a paper in this week’s Nature (paid subscription required) that proposes a solution for animals faced with the same prospects as the tigers in India:

North America lost most of its large vertebrate species — its megafauna — some 13,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene. And now Africa’s large mammals are dying, stranded on a continent where wars are waging over scarce resources. However much we would wish otherwise, humans will continue to cause extinctions, change ecosystems and alter the course of evolution. Here, we outline a bold plan for preserving some of our global megafaunal heritage…

Our vision begins immediately, spans the coming century, and is justified on ecological, evolutionary, economic, aesthetic and ethical grounds. The idea is to actively promote the restoration of large wild vertebrates into North America in preference to the ‘pests and weeds’ (rats and dandelions) that will otherwise come to dominate the landscape. This ‘Pleistocene re-wilding’ would be achieved through a series of carefully managed ecosystem manipulations using closely related species as proxies for extinct large vertebrates…

Bold plan?  Are you kidding me! You guys get what he is saying?  They want to reintroduce lions and tigers and…elephants from Africa into North America so that they have a chance to survive the seemingly inevitable extinction they face in Africa (and most likely India).  This is just ballsy.  There are a dozen reasons why this is a very very bad idea but I like big thinkers.

Continue reading →

Public service announcement

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Kingfisher Beer has put its ‘swimsuit’ calendar online. It’s just like the CNN site which annoys me daily (‘we interrupt you with breaking news: Model of the Day!’), but with lotus pads: zen cheesecake, if you will. There are so many floating flowers in the frame, you’d think it was pitching feminine products instead of beer.

The launch party attained this pinnacle of cheese: Salman Khan (1) in a muscle shirt (2) ripping cheetah print (3) off a bikini calendar (4). Behind him are a large contingent of underfed (5), blue-eyed Anglo-Indians, those ubiquitous khakhi-suited, pot-bellied sipahis (6), and Vijay Mallya (7), who’s way too old to be playing Richard Branson.

Beat that, Hasselhoff.

From the same photographer, here’s Aamir Khan whoring out timepieces in Mangal Pandey attire and cornrows, and a very funny wireless campaign with Javed Jaffrey.

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BusinessHype

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BusinessWeek just published a massive issue dedicated exclusively to India and China (via SAJA). I’m talkin’ huge.

… most economists figure China and India possess the fundamentals to keep growing in the 7%-to-8% range for decades. Barring cataclysm, within three decades India should have vaulted over Germany as the world’s third-biggest economy. By mid-century, China should have overtaken the U.S. as No. 1. By then, China and India could account for half of global output. Indeed, the troika of China, India, and the U.S. — the only industrialized nation with significant population growth — by most projections will dwarf every other economy…

The closest parallel to their emergence is the saga of 19th-century America, a huge continental economy with a young, driven workforce that grabbed the lead in agriculture, apparel, and the high technologies of the era, such as steam engines, the telegraph, and electric lights. But in a way, even America’s rise falls short in comparison to what’s happening now. Never has the world seen the simultaneous, sustained takeoffs of two nations that together account for one-third of the planet’s population. [Link]

India and China accounted for more than 50% of world gross domestic product in the 18th century and to my mind, there is no doubt this will be repeated. [Link]

Their sudsing machine is on hype cycle high:

Google… principal scientist Krishna Bharat is setting up a Bangalore lab complete with colorful furniture, exercise balls, and a Yamaha organ — like Google’s Mountain View (Calif.) headquarters — to work on core search-engine technology… “I find Bangalore to be one of the most exciting places in the world,” says Dan Scheinman, Cisco Systems Inc.’s senior vice-president for corporate development. “It is Silicon Valley in 1999.” [Link]

Today’s reality is more sobering:

Today, China and India account for a mere 6% of global gross domestic product — half that of Japan. [Link]
Continue reading →

Goodness Gracious Me!

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bromwell_high.gif

Anil Gupta, the producer of Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No 42 and executive producer of The Office and number 5 on the Most Powerful Asian in British Media list is about to come out with an irreverant animated comedy which follows the exploits of three exceptionally naughty girls – Keisha Marie, Natella and Latrina – one maverick headmaster, Iqbal, and a group of desperate, overworked and underpaid teachers. Continue reading →

I have my eyes on the Queen

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The Queen of fruits?The only thing of interest that I learned in the comments of this entry is that SM comment leaver DesiDancer likes food.  Well so do I.  The Village Voice reports on a fruit that I am ashamed to admit I have never tried.  It is the “Queen of fruits,” the Mangosteen:

Last month, after a long discussion with his father, my friend gave up on his latest business idea: Importing mangosteens into America. The plan was to petition the government, build a greenhouse, and then get rich off of this rare South Asian fruit, which apparently tastes like ice cream and causes perfectly normal people to burst into tears. R.W. Apple wrote in The New York Times: “I can no more describe mangosteens than explain why I love my wife and children.“

Good God.  What hole have I been living in?  I must have this fruit, I simply must.

durian

Recently, I went to Chinatown to find this dark, purple treat, but the few people who had heard of it told me to stop looking. Mangosteen–widely considered the “queen of all fruit”–carries too many flies to be permitted in the U.S. Because durian, the so-called “king,” was hanging from nearly every fruit stand on East Broadway, I bought one instead. It was $8 and about the size of my head–plus spikes. While mangosteens are said to chill the body, durians are 900-calories a piece and so creamy that last year when a man in Thailand ate four in a row, he passed out and died. The Thai Ministry of Public Health then issued a warning against excessive durian consumption.

Durian looks totally freakish to me.  It’s not surprising that it has been described as such:

We cracked open the skin with a steak knife. Inside there were five red seeds, surrounded by doughy goo. I thought it resembled a dead chicken, but my friends had other ideas: “porcelain fetus,” “alien baby,” “dinosaur egg,” “anonymous shit on sidewalk.” The pulp tasted burnt, warm and sweet, like onion custard, and got more syrupy the closer it was to the seeds. One friend loved it: “Durian is sublime,” she wrote me in an email later that night, “I want to inflict it on people.”

Continue reading →

Fareed Zakaria Is Not Sexy (a syllogism)

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The Village Voice tries to make everything it likes into something sexy, cool, and happening.

They’re aiming to do the same with Fareed Zakaria in their profile of him in this week’s issue. Joy Press piles on the adjectives, starting with the subtitle to the article: “Muslim, Heartthrob, Super-Pundit.” A rather unlikely string of words, isn’t it? (Especially jarring is “Muslim” and “Pundit.” But we’ll let it go.)

Press pushes the sexy button a bit more before Zakaria’s anti-sexy, policy wonk energies start to dominate the interview:

Sitting in his airy corner office at Newsweek, Zakaria is the definition of dapper, clad in a pale yellow checked shirt and crisp khakis. He ignores the constant ambient ping of incoming e-mails and phone calls as he talks about his PBS show. Zakaria may be the pundit world’s answer to the Backstreet Boys, but there’s nothing sexy about Foreign Exchange. It has the standard muted tones of a serious news program, complete with generic set and antiquated electronic theme music. “People ask how we’ll distinguish ourselves from the competition,” Zakaria says animatedly. “What competition? There’s literally not another show on American television that deals only with foreign affairs–you know, the other 95 percent of humanity.” (link)

She starts off this paragraph with a kind of journalistic optimism that her subject is in fact hot and happening. Looking dapper! Ignores email pings! (Translation: he’s a busy man, but cool about it.) Argably, the reference to the Backstreet Boys doesn’t help her cause (though maybe the Backstreet Boys are cool again and I am just out of the loop). However, this earnest effort at Cutening Fareed is betrayed by Zakaria’s use of the word “foreign affairs,” which is about as appealing to the fashion-obsessed Voice as a Slurpee in January. From here on out, the interview is all rigor, internationalism, policy, and PBS.

The other 95 percent of humanity is not sexy. Fareed Zakaria is interested in them. Therefore, Fareed Zakaria is not sexy. QED.

For the record, that’s just fine with me: the U.S. media needs more unsexy Muslim heartthrob superpundits. And less Botox News, please.

See more Zakaria SM posts here, here, here, here, and here. Continue reading →

Having clout is cool

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Apul informs me that Fortune Magazine has released a list of what it considers the 50 most influential people of color.  The real name of the list is, Diversity 2005: People with the most clout.  Why such a wishy-washy title?  Anyways there are three Indians that made the cut:

Sonny Mehta, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Alfred A. Knopf Publishers

Mehta is arguably the most admired editor in book publishing. In his stable: Michael Crichton and Toni Morrison. Also helped President Clinton’s My Life break nonfiction sales records. [Link]

Vyomesh Joshi, EVP of the Imaging and Printing Group at Hewlett-Packard

Restructuring aside, Joshi is still the straw that stirs the drink. Despite rival Dell’s push into printers, his unit alone would rank No. 79 on the Fortune 500. [Link]

and Indra Nooyi, President and CFO of PepsiCo

The executive is known as a skilled strategist. She has engineered tens of billions of dollars in acquisition deals. [Link]

Who do I have to sleep with to make this list next year?

Continue reading →

Leaks, lies and videotape

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Documents leaked last night from the police investigation contradict almost everything the London cops have said about the de Menezes shooting (thanks, Vijay). The current London shoot-to-kill policy now seems like a loose cannon.

The docs say that de Menezes was captured on tape walking into the tube station at a normal pace, picking up a free newspaper, using a tube card to enter and only breaking into a jog at the platform to catch a train. He was wearing a lightweight blue denim jacket (see photo) and was not carrying a backpack. Before getting onto the tube, he took a leisurely, 15-minute bus ride from his apartment to the station, not noticing that he was being tailed by cops. He did not look at all South Asian. Witness statements corroborate the tape.

It’s not clear whether the cops even identified themselves to de Menezes and warned him not to enter the tube. If the leaked docs are accurate, it appears that the only reason the cops killed him is that he emerged from the wrong apartment building. But it’s easy to understand the mistake:

The documents… suggest that the intelligence operation may have been botched because an officer watching a flat… was “relieving himself”. [Link]

One officer reportedly said he “checked the photographs” and “thought it would be worth someone else having a look”. However, he was unable to video the man for subsequent confirmation because he was “relieving” himself at the time. [Link]

Smells like a coverup. What it all means for people with brown skin living under an ill-defined shoot-to-kill policy:

“… he was just unfortunate to be living in a block of flats that was under surveillance and to look slightly brown-skinned…” [Link]

Be careful out there. Details below. Continue reading →

Hundreds of Bombs Rock Bangladesh

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red device.jpg 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… Continue reading →