I would’ve swore at the ref, too. (Thanks, Mankanwal):
Parents and coaches of a Calgary junior soccer team are angry after a Sikh player was barred from a game for insisting on wearing his religious head scarf.
Northwest United was competing in a tournament in this Vancouver suburb when a referee told 17-year-old Gurindar Durah he could not wear his patka, which young, religiously observant Sikhs are required to wear.
Mr. Durah swore at the referee and was ejected from the game. Then his team decided to walk out in protest.
Mad props to his team for standing up and walking out for their boy. Durah’s Coach, Mario Moretti supported his players, calling the tournament “done” the moment the ref brought up Gurindar’s patka:
“This is a decision our players made, not me. I supported my players. They all supported Gurindar, which was a no-brainer for us.”
Of course the people behind the tournament, in a dazzling display of deluded, oblivious lameness stated that Durah was barred from the tournament for “swearing”. Way to address the issue, there.
I’m somewhat shocked that it all went down north of us; I always thought of Cah-naw-duh as being literally and figuratively more chill. Beyond that, the Sikh community there is so accomplished and visible when compared to Amreeka. I unlearn something new, every day.
It is slowly creeping up on you
might be a reason we only see half her face….
I thought they were all busy hating on whichever ladies and their kids weren’t at the party. Scrutinizing their lives, insulting their un-hip wardrobes, picking apart their home decorative sense, trashing their poori-making technique… all the cattiness that desi aunties live and breathe for!
Jai Singh- 2FDB takes Bharatanatyam classes or studies Sanskrit, to their parents’ delight. But when mummy-daddy are away at these auntie-parties, the kids go out wearing jeans that show their kadche and do nasty grinding dancing to 50 Cent and R Kelly. din-din-na-na indeed! And yes, if left unmoderated, 2FDB may turn into Pervert Uncle or BIFFF. So corrupt these vestern vays, hai ram!
cicatrix
No chance of me embracing my Unclehood gracefully – I reckon I’m going to be Alcoholic Uncle – the one who makes a fool of himself at parties and weddings so nobody ever invites him to a ‘programme’ ever again and who needs a liver transplant after his business fails. Dies lonely. On welfare. With no teeth. Drinking from a can of petrol.
Desi dancer
Nah! am still in nascency of auntiedom. It begins innocently enough. Slowly gains crescendo I guess as all describe.(shudder, shudder) Peer group is not there yet.
Wistful Auntie
PB
Dont say that. For all the kindness that you showed me today, there is help to be found in auntiedom. Since I will be in an ashram then,(my sneaky suspicions tell me)you can hang there and get free food. (even get ganja)
Sumita
What about Waste Management Engineer Uncle?
This is the uncle that corners you during the intermission of a Bollywood Spectacle like Veer-Zaara and complains that there has never been a spicey Bollywood spectacle with a Waste Management Engineer as the love interest.
Okay…er…I didn’t think it qualified as a stereotype…just something weird that happened to me…I wanted to get it off my chest…
Sumita
I said before that you were from the Kind and Understanding school of Aunty’s – I look forward to rolling a spliff with you in my Ashram.
Are you sure you’re not Wild Aunty in disguise?
Christopher
Thats wild!
That really happened? Was the guy drunk?
Sumita
(Or are you maiking this up?)
btw, re: dress codes and what not. i’m surprised no one has brought up the issue of distinctive conformity as being essential for group cohesion. i mean, a lot of the ritual purity taboos and what not common among hindus, muslims and jews derive from the need to set outgroup vs. ingroup. i know muslims are technically not supposed to take food from ‘pagans’ (ie; jews and christians are OK). in the letters of paul in the NT he even addresses the point about eating food that has been consecrated to idiols (i believe he said it was OK if you were strong in your faith, but if you weren’t, avoid it).
i have made the analogy between women who wear burquas at their job as a wells fargo teller and girls who insist are being gothic piercers, it’s a statement of distance from the rest of the society about how cool you are. in the case of religious or ethnic groups who dress or behave different it is often a self-assertion of group coolness, ie; the higher up you go in caste the more food and purity taboo issues you have, in muslim majority areas under strict shariah there were explicit ways in which dhimmis were not to pollute muslim public spaces (the term “dirty kufir” is highly appropriate). i have reading instances of big disputes between chinese muslims and the majority han population, and many of them refer to hygiene related conflicts. i strongly suspect that “hygiene related” is a mistranslation of what’s really going on, that is “ritual pollution” related conflicts (the fact that chinese eat pork is often a central issue).
in the USA we tend to look at these issues from a legalistic-individual perspective. muslim girls often present the functional, utilitarian aspects of hijab or burqas, that they promote modesty and self-control of their sexuality and allow other people to view them as individuals rather than sex objects. i think that’s disingenuous because by wearing a hijab or burqa you probably bring MORE eyeballs your direction in the USA and further exoticize yourself. there are obviously some familial and community pressures, but in american muslim communities where it isn’t normative yet i think part of the practice is the raising up of group identifiers of US vs. them and i suspect an actualization of some values about group purity vs. outsider pollution. in other words, burqas are symbolic markers delineating a difference and cleavage in society. and that bothers me. western liberal democratic societies can tolerate a certain amount of diversity of substructure, but beyond a certain point this groupishness tends to subborn fellow feeling of citizenship. imagine if amish were 1% of the population as opposed to .01% (reductio ad absurdum). or hasidic jews were 5% of the population as opposed to .1%.
Genetics Uncle
Writes posts like the above.
PB
My hubby is a Punjab-da-puttar. Me bangali(Ok fake, not really) kudi.
No chance of me being wild aunty. See?(now relax)Ever seen a wild aunty married to Punjab-da-puttar?
I didnt think so!! laughing very hard
Auntie Sumita
Hey Punjabi Boy, you could be the desi Henry Darger!!!
Only don’t go the alcohol route. passe. Bukowski made other drinkers look like kids hugging juice-boxes. Darger went with Pepto-Bismol, so I suggest something equally random and esoteric. NyQuil? Sizzurp??
But first, remember to bring inappropriate gifts when invited to parties. Quickest way to get off invite lists. I suggest anything with a sexual overtone. Especially for sweet sixteens.
Advice for me?
Dont forget the tragic ones:
Widow Aunty and Widower Uncle
They are always the really nice ones too.
dude, i’m 28 and all my siblings are younger than me (by a bunch). so i ain’t no uncle.
cicatrix
Tennesse Williams choked to death on a bottle top. Anything less embrassing than that would be a victory.
Any advice?
Go for it! Be Scandal Aunty! Becoming a legend! Break every taboo and then some! Screw ’em all!
I meant figuratively screw ’em all, not literally, although you know, its an option open to all, not particularly you, you know, just whatever…
Sumita
Yeah – Punjabi-Bengali combinatons is one of the best I reckon – cant beat it – winning team!
razib
LoL I was only joking man! I cant believe you are only 28 – I said it before – you are going to be the first Atheist Bangaldeshi American to win a Nobel Prize – I’m not kidding.
this thread is surely one reason i come to SM though. a peek at a transnational brown anglais dialect.
scandal aunty, eh?
well, I’m rather afraid that’s already been done. At least as far as Sri Lankans go. No way I could top that.
cicatrix vacillates between forlorn and relieved
cicatrix
Thats not scandal – the real Scandal Aunty will be when Sunny Leone or Nadia Nyce are in their late forties and living back at home – then they will be Porno Aunty
hey cic, how come sri lanaka didn’t become part of india? at least the tamil part? i mean, you guys are brown? do you have a really distincitive identity? like the british vs. continentals or something? always wondered….
Aw, Razib. I like you, even (sort of) when you ramble on about cytokinesis defective isoalleles or whatever….but of course we have a distinctive identity! Even the LTTE would come over to stab your ass for questioning that!
Sinhalese is a Pali variant that sounds nothing like other SA languages and has it’s own script…that looks weirdly like Thai. Details on the script.
Here’s wiki on some very brief history/background.
Sri Lankan Tamil, while using the same script as the Southern Indian Tamil, has enough differences in accent, pronounciation, verb changes etc to almost be another dialect altogether.
India has never colonized sri lanka fully, although most Tamils in SL descend from waves of attempted invasions…The north Jaffna area was actually a Tamil kingdom for quite a while. Even the portuguese and the dutch never conquered the whole island since the SL kings just retreated to fortresses in the mountains.
It wasn’t until the British (who came during a period of unrest in the Sinhala court, and told agitating courtiers that they would have Brit military backing to sieze the thrown if they killed the king. Of course, once the idiots did, that the Brits took over everything) that the whole country was conquered and the royal line bumped off.
cytokinesis defective isoalleles
i don’t know jack about cytology (at least enough to ramble about).
and yeah, i’ve read about the kingdom of kandy and what not. but there were parts of indian (the highlands of the gonds) which were never assimilated into the brown powers of the day anyhow.
i guess what i’m asking is if you did a characteristic based cladogram would it be like so:
cluster A: mainland browns (pakistan, bangladesh, indian, nepal inclusive)
cluster B: sri lankan browns
or
cluster A: north indian browns
cluster B: east indian browns
cluster C: south indian browns
cluster D: sri lankan browns
and so on.
my family was friends with a sri lankan muslim family when we lived in pennsylvania. they were kind of strange in that they hung with browns all the time, but sometimes they would say things as if they were different somehow. also, they were tamil speakers by origin but their kids only spoke english (never taugh ’em tamil).
p.s. my underestanding genetically sri lankans cluster with south indians (with some european, arab, etc. mixed via some communities like burghers), while the philology of sinhalese is leaning more toward affinities with bengali than gujarati (though those are very distant anyhow).
cic, i’m specifically asking for your impressionistic perspective. i’ve read a bit of sri lankan history…but they don’t get a sense as muc how sri lanka relates to brown mainland as much as how it evolved endogenously.
p.s. did you ever see arthur c. clarke? i know people have to ask you that now and then.
South Asia is such a fractious place, have there actually been any groups seeking to join with each other? Everyone just seems hellbent on splitting off.
But yeah, like Cicatrix said, various tamil kingdoms in southern india tried and failed and allied and unallied and mixed and unmixed with various sinhala kingdoms in sri lanka but i dont know if any one power ever even controlled the whole island, much less tried to annex it.
And the sinhalese are thought to be from northern india, originally
from personal experience, indian tamils are seen more as cousins rather than brothers, if that makes sense
and the aunty/uncle archetypes you guys made up are hilarious, and oh so fitting
“Sometimes they would say things as if they were different”
What do you mean? As if they were not brown? or not like other Indians?
As for cladograms..er, frankly I don’t know. My guess is that it’s closer to option two.
btw: There is an indegenous hunter-gatherer tribal group, still living in the forests of SL who are said to be (and most likely are) the real Sri Lankans. They’ve been ignored by everyone and are slowly assimilating/dying out. They are called Veddas in Sinhalese. From what I understand, at least in terms of mythology, Ravana (of Sita fame) was actually from this group, so this stupid Sinhala-Tamil squabbling means nothing when faced with the stregnth of their claim.
Sometimes they would say things as if they were different
they would be sitting a room filled with browns (almost all muslims, sometimes mixed-religion) from various parts of brownland. occassionally some of the urdu or hindi speakers would speak in their language assuming people would understand them and they would joke “oh you indians, not everyone speaks your language” and stuff like that. but when the other people would talk, they would speak inclusively as if the sri lankans were indian (1/3 of the people were from pakistan and my parents are bangladeshi, but the general sense). what i’m trying to say is that browns, whether pakistani, bangladeshi, muslim indian, hindu, christian, etc. etc. share certain references. partition. or spicy food. or hindu-muslim tensions. as a sri lankan are there many references that simply aren’t applicable? ie; the hindu-muslim tensions are obviously not as salient since sri lanka is a buddhist nation with ethnic more than religious tensions.
as for the veddas, i understand that they speak sinhalese now and have a for while, so their indigenous cultures is to a large extent lost….
my personal impression of how SL related to the brown mainland?
Not at all.
Indian may well be Sweden for all most Sri Lankans care.
My aunt, a Sinhala/Pali teacher, saved up to go on a pilgrimage/tour of all the Buddhist sites still in India. She came back, amusingly shocked that people crapped on the streets there 🙂
This is back when I lived in SL. It’s just a bit more laid-back (and, oddly or not, hot-tempered and violent) than mainland india. That warm climate island thing seems to have more of an influence. Reggae is huge 😉
And the sinhalese are thought to be from northern india, originally
the language is indo-european, but my understanding is that ancestrally they share much more with the tamil speakers, that is, it was likely elite transmission. i looked this up once out of curiosity, it was really difficult for geneticists to separate sinhalese from tamils into two components….
here are some CIA factbook numbers for sri lanka for the rest of us:
total population: 73.17 years male: 70.6 years female: 75.86 years (2005 est.) 1.85 children born/woman (2005 est.) definition: age 15 and over can read and write total population: 92.3% male: 94.8% female: 90% (2003 est.)
and tx cic. i think i got what i wanted (data wise).
oh dear, how could we have overlooked the 2 favorites of Goodness Gracious Me: Everything Comes From India Uncle, and I Could Make That At Home For Free Auntie!!
My favorite nickname for a few select family friends (behind their backs, of course): Jheri Curl Auntie, Tranny Auntie (she’s a man, baby!), Eat & Run Uncle, Denture Smell Auntie, Rhythmically Challenged Auntie, and Kmart Uncle.
…and don’t forget the Underachieving ABCD… subject of many a desperate family conference… the kid who spends his school years smoking pot and playing Dungeons and Dragons while all the other Jimmy Neutron/Doogie Howser/Richie Rich types are already planning for their first Nobel. When he/she finally gets a graduate degree… it’s in a Humanities field. The horror…
/Not that I’d know anything about that…
Ah, yes, I call that Uncle “In Vedic Times” Uncle. And let’s not forget “I’m so damn proud of myself for talking to the younger set, I don’t actually listen to what they’re saying” Aunt/Uncle. And, of course, “When I was your age” Aunt/Uncle.
We called one woman with particularly unruly hair Bird’s Nest Aunty. Unfortunately, this made her baldish husband Bird’s Nest Uncle!
Well, sure. I do the same thing. Within a brown group I make my Sri lankan-ness clearly known. When around non-browns I don’t really make a fuss if they refer to me as Indian. I assume that outher South Asians would have some knowledge base, so being SL is an important (to me at any rate) distinction. Even non-browns, as they become acquaintances, or friends, are told pretty clearly every damn thing they’d need to know in order to understand that SL is not India.
I don’t mind being considered Indian, at all. It’s just that it would be false, wouldn’t it? That’s not were I grew up. It’s a different soverign country, with language, history, culture, dress, aesthetic sense (much more minimalist than India) etc to go along with all that.
Of course, general references are shared and appreciated..British colonization and rule, curry (though SL food curries are nothing like what I eat in Indian restuarants. We don’t use yoghurt or ghee, or cream everything, or use cheese. The curries are more liquid, with coconut milk, curry leaves, mustard seed, fenugreek etc being dominant flavors. As close to Thai or Phillipino food as it is to indian), saris, familial culture, etc.
Ok, small example. I chat up cabbies quite frequently, and if they are brown, they always ask if I’m Indian. When I say, nope, Sri Lankan, you should see the glee with which the Bangladeshi guys say, “ahhh!!! I am from Bangladesh!!!” It’s sort of a secret, overshadowed-by-India society 😉
I understand that a pan-south-asian ‘indentity’, (questionable proposition, sure, but one I don’t mind accepting) would be heavily India-influenced. I don’t really have a problem with that. I sprinkle hindi words in my comments because there is a shared understanding, even though no one speaks Hindi in Sri Lanka, and I learned every one of those words after moving to NY. I don’t mind an all-brown generalization. But within that generalization, if one were to discuss specifics, that I am decidedly Sri Lankan, not Indian.
er, does that make sense?
But within that generalization, if one were to discuss specifics, that I am decidedly Sri Lankan, not Indian.
of course. bengali cuisine is heavy on mustard oil too. i am aware of differences and would have difficulty relating to some aspects of brown culture even if was immersed in it because it is diverse. by intent was to ask if you feel that the fact that sri lanka is a separate island makes it even more different from indian than bangladesh, for example. i mean, “indian” national identities can’t really be pushed back really far anyway….
btw: the avg literacy rate was as high as 97% in the early 80s. Fell since the war.
Oh my God. Have you people gone insane? What is going on with this thread? Someone needs to switch to decaff. MD – Madhu Aunty.
*Yes, yes, ennis, I promise to read the links you sent and respond….only taking a small break from work…..
Well, I can’t answer that since I don’t know if a Bangladeshi would agree with me if I said it’s more different. I don’t know the degree to which a bangladeshi feels about it. But being an island does make the rest of the world seem a bit more remote, sure. And definitely that means not feeling connected to India in any way.
I brought up my aunt’s visit to India as an example because to Sri Lankans living in SL, India is a foreign country. Much more so than visiting canada or Britain would be to an American. (well, a relatively cosmopolitan american. not the THEY DRIVE ON THE RIGHT! HOW WEIRD! sort of american)
The more I get to know about India/Indians (from living in NYC, heh hehh) the more I realize that SL is actually different. mr.cicatrix (no were not married) is half-punjabi, and he was really taken aback when first confronted with SL food. He kept asking for the bloody yoghurt. It was way spicy-hot and had a disturbing amount of small fishy elements 😉
Mustard seed, btw. Very different from the oil, in use.
I’m told by Bengali’s that the Prince Vijay of the sinhala origin myth/story/fact was actually Bengali. I just know he’s supposed to have been from some western part of india, north-ish. As for genetic differences between Tamil and Sinhalese…as a former Anthropology major, I’m trained to scoff at anything that tries to seperate people into genetic groups. So much is similiar, the differences are trivial, no?
And with that revalation I’m outed as an underachieving humanities leaning ABCD.. well, not the AB, and I dispute the C 😉
I’ve only been to southern india (Trichy, Chennai, the parts between) but it’s like a different world from SL. So much more poverty, crowding, garbage, the smell… culturally I have no idea, but in terms of development, worlds apart.
Desidancer, those sound similar to wholesaler uncle, who can find you anything for cheap!
Those two are hilarious! Gold Star for you today DD!!
…I’m trained to scoff at anything that tries to seperate people into genetic groups. So much is similiar, the differences are trivial, no?
depends. let me elaborate through two lines. first the phylogenetic. the ‘hidden jews’ of new mexico have an oral history that they hare descended from conversos who reverted to judaism in new spain. a few years ago an article in the atlantic monthly came out which ‘debunked’ these claims and posited (via anthropological sources) that these ‘hidden jews’ were actually indigenous converts to seventh day adventism (a christian sect with a lot of adherence to hebraic law) from the late 19th and early 20th century who had concocted a more prestigous white ancestry for themselves. well, some geneticists checked their DNA, and it turns out that their ancestral phylogenies are similar to that of cohens the world over (there is a lineage called the ‘cohen modal haplotype’ which is common in jewish groups throughout the world, from germany to india). so in this case, genetic differences do make a big difference, the debunking of the debunking of the cultural anthropologists would likely never have occurred. i myself accepted the anthropological explanation when i read the story in the atlantic (there were reasons the anthropologists were skeptical, there were other judaizing groups in mexico). one can do the same sort of thing to analyze the origin mythologies of most groups.
also, there are functional differences between groups. it is clear in food for instance, lactose tolerance vs. intolerance is 70:30 in north india and flipped in south india. and one reason that people of mixed-race often have difficult finding organ tissue matches is because of the diversity (and variation) in immune incompatibility signatures.
so to be frank, i am well aware that in anthropology and other social sciences genetics dismissed. in large part because of past uses and abuses. but i am not so skeptical for a variety of reasons 🙂
Aren’t Wholesaler Uncle and I Know A Guy Uncle cousins?
Oh hell, they’re all cousins…
Punjabi Boy- oh dear,I could go on all day… Combover Uncle, Pants Too High Uncle, Cheap Henna Uncle (with the flaming red hair)… I haven’t figured out a name that rolls off the tongue for the auntie whose sari fatrolls look like she has packs of hot dogs stuck to her sides…Oh and Topi Uncle (who wears a toupee that looks like a squirrel)
MD, yes, I’m totally losing it 😀
DD – what about the Multiple-Chinned Aunty? I know one who had at least FIVE! I shit you not.
And maybe this is a FOB thing…but the uncles and aunties who still insist that coconut oil is the best for your hair? The ones, aunties especially, who don’t realize their stash of the miracle pomade has gone a bit rancid? So each hug is a bit like being trapped in a rotting coconut?
That’s a Mallu/Tamil thing AFAIK. Whereas Punjabi aunties love them the henna.
I don’t think wearing turban is a religious requirement for sikhs. I don’t see sikh women wearing turban. Does it make them less religious? I don’t think the sikh god has one set of rules for men and another for women. Why is there no movement among sikh men to get rid of this anachronistic practice? I really feel sorry for sikhs; they have one additional burden to overcome for successful assimilation.
I just thought that it was cool this post had like 145 comments….
….
What? Did you expect me to say something substantial?
Bah.
Yes they do and to be honest they should do as the 5 K’s apply equally to men and women.
I think your getting us confused with somebody. There isn’t a particular “Sikh” God, the Divine has expressed her/his/it’self to everyone, its just that Sikhi is the expressway to the Divine.
On the contrary we are going to assimilate YOU in the nicest possible way. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to the Sangat Resistance is futile, we are the BHOG.
I
Of course not because they don’t look nice with a pujee and the ones that do have those eyes that never blink and burn with an frightening intensity especially when they talk about Godless infidels or especially when your dear Uncleji is simply proposing they marry my sister’s, cousin’s, brother’s son who needs a visa who lives in a pit in Jagron with a family of goats. So I had a little drinkee, Can’t she take a joke……
Oh yes the “I understand your problems of you young people and am unshockable Advise Auntie” A very dangerous aunty because either: a) They think the problems of young people are restricted to getting a good job and a nice spouse. And when you tell them about your love for a non-Asian/ need to run away/ pregancy/ drug habit or causal experimenting with beastlity They just freak ! b) Its a ruse to provide material to blackmail you.
I’m adding international conspiracy uncle to the list.
commentator_desi
Thanks for making me laugh this morning – yours is the stupidest and most ignorant comment I ever read on this website – cheers dude! You must have a lot of issues there! Keep it up!