Well, I’m up at the infamous North Dakota headquarters, and I have to say that from the brief glimpses I’ve managed to catch so far, it seems pretty swank. At the moment they’ve got me locked up in a crawlspace next to the Champagne Room with only a laptop to keep me company; it was a bit cramped at first, but now that I’ve cleared out the last of the empty kasippu bottles and deflated the dolls, things are starting to feel a bit more homey around here.

Being selected as the next Sepia Mutiny guestblogger is quite an honor for me; all day I’ve been trawling the internet in search of a fitting subject for my first post. I considered topics ranging from the upcoming Sri Lankan presidential election to an update on the guy who played Jawarharlal in the hit sitcom Head of the Class. Ultimately, I decided that it would be best to brush up on my acronyms before wading into the murky alphabet soup of Sri Lankan politics, and to hold off on the Jory Husain/Joher Coleman update pending further research.  Just as I began to despair of ever finding a suitable millionaire topic for my marriage post, the Mutineers presented me with that gift most treasured by desi bloggers the world over:  A Suketu Mehta article to blog about!

Apparently, in between teaching his children Hindi and trying not to get bitchslapped by pseudo-bigamist/filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Mehta managed to find the time to write an article for the New York Times Magazine, evocatively titled, “So the Jains, They Have a Problem with Beef in the School Lunches.  Who They Gonna Call?” As you probably did not gather from the title, the article is about Alex Martins, a Nitin Ganatra-lookalike and “fixer” for New York City’s South Asian immigrant community.  As both an immigration/personal injury lawyer and a wine importer/distributor, 40-year-old Martins is evidently a man of many business cards (and my nominee for the 2005 Slashie Award):

When I first asked for his card, Martins gave me four. One identified him as an immigration and personal-injury lawyer affiliated with the firm Frenkel, Hershkowitz & Shafran. A second card testified to his role as C.E.O. of Ara Global Trading, “Importer and Distributor of Exclusive Wines.” Two others actually belonged to his wife, Maureen Martins, D.D.S., of Bright Smile Dental Care in Flushing and Valley Stream, N.Y. (“We love to see you smile.”) He frequently conducts business out of her offices.

When he’s not lawyering, importing, distributing, or stealing his wife’s business cards, Martins uses his connections to arrange visas, jobs, business permits, and assorted other bureaucratic confetti for immigrants recently arrived in New York. 

Mehta suggests that Martins learned the importance of connections early on, not from Streisand, as I did, but from the school of life:

Martins grew up in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the son of an officer in the merchant marine. He started running a catering business at age 14. Then he started manufacturing bakery equipment (“kneaders, grinders and hollow waffle machines”). Later he ran a nightclub, and when his father, a devout Catholic, found out about the club, he threw Alex out of his house. “And that’s why I left the country,” Martins says. He had become friendly with the United States consul general in Mumbai, Harry Cahill, who introduced him around at the United States Chamber of Commerce and arranged for his American visa.

So what does Martins do, exactly?  After reading the article, I can’t say that I’m completely sure.  However, I do know that it involves wearing snazzy ties:

Martins quickly figured out that to deal with what former Mayor David Dinkins once called New York’s gorgeous mosaic, you have to wear a gorgeous tie. He showed me a photo from a 2004 fund-raiser for the Congress of Italian-Americans Organization (CIAO), in which he appeared with one arm around Bloomberg and his other around a diminutive Italian grandmother named Mary Crisalli Sansone, the founder of the organization. Martins was sporting a particularly vivid tricolor tie. “It’s not the Italian flag, in fact,” he confessed, “but it’s close.” He has ties for his visits to every ethnic community, with an approximation of the colors of their national flags. When he went to meet Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, he wore a tie that sported the green, white and saffron of the Indian flag.

Mehta posits that Martins is an example of a certain immigrant archetype:

Historically, every immigrant group that has come to New York has relied on people like Martins: a man of connections, a man you call when your son is caught shoplifting or your cousin needs a visa or your nephew needs a city job. He is not a politician – not yet, at least – but he is a political creature. He is the representative who helps new immigrants reach their elected representatives.

Martins may be a man of connections, but unfortunately, those connections don’t always make for particularly exciting reading.  In the course of the article, Martins introduces an Indian doctor in search of a cardiology fellowship to a senator, then arranges a medical appointment for a Goan priest with the same doctor’s friend.  Later he convinces a taxi service to provide free advertising for a City Council candidate.  In a somewhat confusing paragraph, Mehta describes how Martins also helped out some displaced taxi drivers from New Orleans:

New York politicians, knowing Martins’s links with the Indian community, often reach out to him with opportunities for his constituency. The Democratic state senator John Sabini was recently walking along the street in Jackson Heights when he saw a Pakistani cabby driving a taxi that was clearly from New Orleans. Sabini flagged down the driver and discovered that the cabby was an evacuee and had his wife and 20-month-old baby with him in the car. Sabini found the cabby hotel accommodations through the city’s marketing agency and a job through the owner of a taxi fleet. The taxi-fleet owner has since offered a job to any driver from the Gulf Coast. Shams Tarek, a Bangladeshi immigrant and top aide to Sabini, explains that Sabini’s office will actively seek out Martins and ask him “if he knows any Sikh cabbies, or anybody from the South who’s impacted by the hurricane.”

Is it just me, or does this paragraph make it sound as though Martins barely had anything to do with this episode, apart from receiving a phone call from Sabini’s office? Did Martins actually point any displaced people to Sabini’s office, or was he just asked to? If he did, why not mention them?  Much of the article left me similarly perplexed.  Mehta provides a novel window on the ways that immigrants engage with the political process, but I was still left wondering, is Alex Martins really that different from all the other South Asian busybodies floating around the Uncle-and-Auntysphere? Where’s the beef?

Not long ago, New York’s Jain community had a festival, and Martins arranged an appearance by Louis Gelormino, an attorney who has served in the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations. The Jains are ideal New Yorkers: nonviolent and rich. They are largely made up of diamond merchants and other entrepreneurs from India, and they follow a religion that mandates extreme pacifism.

The Jains, though, had some highly specific demands, which they were not shy about expressing to Martins. “They want beef not to be served in the public schools that their children go to,” he explained to me. The Jains are also opposed to the eating of eggs, as well as root vegetables like onions, garlic and potatoes, which cannot be uprooted without killing the entire plant. Martins was sympathetic but firm: “I said to the community leaders, ‘This is not possible.’ I said, ‘It is very difficult to have an eggless cake for you.’ ” Martins often serves the function of gently explaining the limits of political power to the communities he works with – for instance, that New York City is not going to ban hamburgers in the schools any time in the foreseeable future. Still, he managed to restore the Jains’ faith in the political system by arranging for city approval for parking outside their temple in Queens.

So when the Jains have a problem with beef in the school lunches, they call Alex Martins, who gets them a parking permit.  Unsurprisingly, Martins’ thirst for power remains unslaked:

I asked Martins if he had ever considered entering politics himself. “If the time comes, I will take the challenge,” he said. He said he could see himself running in a state or city contest, from neighborhoods like Richmond Hill, Ozone Park or Flushing, which have lots of South Asians.

Martins reveals that his ambitions don’t end there:

As the level in the wine bottle descended, the conversational range expanded, and the group began discussing topics of national and then international importance. “I could find bin Laden,” Martins declared at one point. This would be done, he said, by “squeezing the bin Laden family.” He put a hand up in the air and closed his palm. The opinion of the table was that the Bush administration probably knows where bin Laden is but has a vested interest in not capturing him. Martins, though, it was agreed, could find him. If anyone could do it, he could. He could fix it.