Monthly Archives: October 2005

Trolls and orcs and balrogs, oh my

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The province of Ontario is subsidizing the Toronto Lord of the Rings musical with a $2.5M (U.S.) loan. As posted earlier, A.R. Rahman is composing the music, his theater sequel to Bombay Dreams. It promises to be the most expensive theater production ever:

Ontario’s officials – on behalf of their 12 million citizens – have signed on as investors for the show, which is expected to be one of the most expensive ever… the provincial government will contribute some $2.5 million of the show’s $23 million budget… The stage version’s $23 million price tag would make it more expensive than any show on Broadway. “The Lion King,” by comparison, cost Disney some $20 million…

Air Canada has donated more than $1 million worth of airline tickets to help the creative team – which includes… an Indian composer, A. R. Rahman; and a Finnish folk music group, Värttinä – commute back and forth to Toronto…

Press materials circulated for the show call it “the biggest and most ambitious theatrical production ever staged,” promising a three-and-a-half-hour event that starts even before the curtain rises. (Hobbits are to prowl the aisles as the audience enters.) [Link]

The one fiscal conservative left in Canada was outraged:

… eight of every 10 Broadway shows fails to earn back their money… “This government is certainly creative when it comes to spending taxpayers money, but not when it comes to saving it…” Kheiriddin noted that the province dropped $1-million to get popular American talk-show host Conan O’Brien to host a week of TV shows in Toronto last year.

But Bradley said… $4.6-million in grants offered by the province following the SARS outbreak generated some $50-million for Ontario’s tourism industry. [Link]

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Let’s get that damn Wererabbit

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I have been a die-hard Wallace and Gromit fan for years now.  Ever since I saw A Grand Day Out on PBS in the 90s, I’ve been hooked.  In that movie the clumsy inventor Wallace with his faithful and cerebral dog Gromit, go to the Moon to look for cheese (which they have run out of).  There was no movie that I was looking more forward to seeing this year than Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Wererabbit (well except for one maybe).  I will probably go this weekend to watch it.  For the last month in fact I was desperately searching for a desi angle on the movie so that I could bring this dynamic duo to the attention of SM readers.  Manish emailed me this morning about our old friend Turbanhead’s latest post.  It seems there is a desi character in the new movie.  So who is this South Asian character, and how does he fit into the film?  Turbanhead tells us:

Towards the end, the “Indian” character is the one who improvises a stand that sells pitchforks and torches to an angry mob.

Ha!  Well…I mean someone has to provide weapons to an angry mob…err, right?  May as well make a buck off of it.  Those damn wererabbits need to be hunted down anyways right?  You could say he is an exemplary citizen.

Footnote: Bad news. Let’s hope the desi character didn’t provide the torches for this one. Continue reading →

Transglobal Trade Transparency

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Isn’t that title just thrillingly trillable? So is the notion that consumers can use information to purchase products supporting their tastes in environmentalism and social justice. “October is Free Trade Month,” a billboard reminded me at the Berkeley BART station–also reminding me that dhaavak owes me a tip on a Rajasthani fair trade NGO.  Taking up where the beloved Cicatrix left off, let us examine the possibilities for a mutiny of the wallet.

Cotton is crucial: ever since Megasthenes told Seleucus of  “there being trees on which wool grows” in Indika, it’s been one of the subcontinent’s great exports.  For many diasporic desi dads, soft cotton wifebeaters are a must-not-forget purchase on trips back to the homeland. From Gandhi’s spinning days, the ties between social justice and khadi are apparently enshrined in a requirement that the Indian Flag be made only from khadi. Socially conscientious clothing is a constant work in progress, at home and abroad:  ETC India.org  and Dutch development group Solidaridad have announced that they will collaborate to create a Fair Trade Organic Cotton Supply Chain, connecting individual farmers, mills, clothing factories, and markets:

So far, 405 farmers have been enrolled in the programme, who are producing organic cotton in an extent of 1,352 acres of land spread over five rainfed districts in the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh and two rainfed districts in the Vidharbha region of Maharashtra. . .He said that Rajalakshmi Mills of Kolkata was currently supporting farmers by purchasing cotton and marketing it in the US and Europe. Last fiscal, over 100 tonnes of lint cotton was sold at a premium of Rs 200 to Rs 250 per tonne over the prevailing market rates. (Link)

It’s the kind of support that’s vitally necessary to small famers whose plight has been highlighted by a plague of suicides.

Raise your hands if your parents usually have a giant bag of rice sitting in the kitchen. Basmati is a key ingredient in making our home away from home, and TransFairUSA now certifies fair traded rice from India, Thailand, and Egypt,:

Traditionally, these farmers have sold their rice to local middlemen rather than developing relationships with exporters. The low prices they receive often do not cover their costs of production, leaving them unable to repay the loans they need to buy seeds and fertilizer and further impoverishing their families. Fair Trade certification ensures that rice farmers receive a fair price for their harvest, creates direct trade links between farmers and buyers, and provides access to affordable credit. Through Fair Trade, farmers and their families are earning a better income for their hard work – allowing them to hold on to their land, keep their kids in school, and invest in the quality of their harvest.

There are three licensed west coast distributors of this fair trade rice, including this supplier of organic basmati rice. Consider taking contact information to your local grocer next time you go shopping.

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The inalienable right to blog

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The IIPM issue in India provides me with a great opportunity to educate SM readers and fellow bloggers about the assault of late on a precious (but little known) liberty here in the United States of America.  It is the fundamental, God-given right to blog!  A few weeks back we received what was intended to be a “Cease and Desist Notice” from someone claiming to be the lawyer of a person that we had written about on SM.  This “lawyer” threatened legal action and dire consequences unless we took down the “libelous” statements against their client.  However, in none of our posts had we made any libelous statements about the semi-celebrity in question.  Rather, it was some of the commenters to our site that had written what might be considered rude.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I represent the legal interests of ########. The content on your site contains libelous information that is against the interests of my client ########. The information on your website cannot be verified and contains defamatory, heresay information.

We are firmly requesting that you take down this web site within 24 hours. We are prepared to take legal action against your company and will sue you at the full extent of the law for punitive damages.

This notice was followed by several others (including a “second notice” time stamped two minutes after the first one) that increasingly led us to believe that this lawyer was either a friend of the person we had offended, or the person themselves posing as a lawyer.  Making a few spelling mistakes and citing laws that seem sketchy, sort of erode one’s credibility.  Getting sued over this might have been a welcome experience though.  I have always sort of dreamed of representing myself in front of the Supreme Court, grilled by Scalia, and waking up to that goddess Nina Totenberg re-capping my oral arguments on NPR as I lay in bed the next morning in rapture.  I coulda’ been a contenda’.  Having reviewed the relevant precedents, we think we would have done quite well in court if slapped with a lawsuit.  I am what people would term a Constitutional Originalist. Who am I to doubt what the Framers originally put into the Constitution?  Who am I to question or re-interpret their original intentions?  Let me direct you to Article IV Section 4 of that most sacred of documents:

The United States shall guarantee the rights of every Blogger in this Union, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence and frivolous lawsuits.

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Reminder: Brooklyn meetup Sunday

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Meetup reminder: Come by Arzan’s place for a home-cooked Parsi lunch. Arzan lives in the Clinton Hill ‘hood in Brooklyn by the Manhattan Bridge. We’re meeting Sunday, Oct. 16 at 12:30 pm.

Sunday afternoon is traditionally the time when every Parsi household in the world has dhansak. It’s a dal and rice dish. Brown rice with a masala daal which has a lot of different ingredients. It’s accompanied by mutton kebabs and chilled beer.

Please RSVP [disabled] for directions, because his living room space is finite. First come, first served. Let him know whether you’re vegetarian.

Previous post here.

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Amrikan Gothic

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Apart from Kal Penn’s little brother’s five-minute Goth phase in the movie Where’s the Party, Yaar?, South Asian Goths seem to be largely absent from the desi cultural landscape.  While doing some extensive research on the topic, I learned that a Google search for “South Asian Goths” yields no results, that “Indian Goth” leads largely to porn links, and that half of Google’s “Desi Goths” results point to some guy’s profile on RateDesi: the Desi Hot or Not.  (His average rating is a 7.7393.)  But there’s also this guy:

Shumit Basu designs custom corsets and other items for his label Underground Aristocracy, which has been “hand-crafting corsets for the discerning corset enthusiast since 1997 using a range of materials from fine silk to leather.”  Basu studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the London College of Fashion, and has been designing for over ten years. Underground Aristocracy currently offers a large selection of corsets for sale, and also promises that more items including bridal wear, accessories, skirts, and cats (?) will soon be available online.

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The Toral is Unleashed

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I’ve been working like a dog the past few months & one of my few connections to pop culture has been my beloved TiVo.  So, after a day of conference calls & meetings, I decided to vege a bit and watch last week’s Apprentice and check out how Sepia Mutiny’s friend Toral Mehta was doing.

Now, in contrast to Raj who dished up the drama almost from the outset, Toral’s been disappointingly flying beneath the radar and laying low.   No longer – last week her fangs were unleashed and my-oh-my what snobby, elitist, east coast fangs they were.   A few choice quotes –

“I’m from Wharton …we’re really here to demonstrate work ethic and that’s a different style of thinking from those individuals who have not been trained by large corporate institutions

“I would have to say that there are a group of women here [pointing at a gaggle of laughing blondes] who have banded together based on the fact that they have no work experience.   I like them all on a personal level, I think they’re cute people if I had a secretary job or an administrative job, I’d happily hire any of these people”

Oh Boy.   Now that’s a good way inspire folks.  Note to The Toral, it’s one thing to not forget the little people as you rocketship takes off.   It’s a different thing to tell ’em they’re little before your ship has even left the ground. 

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Legitimate force (updated)

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Anna posted earlier about the IIPM affair, where a degree mill in India has pressured a blogger into leaving his job by threatening his employer, simply because they didn’t like a site he linked to.

One thing has been bothering me about this kerfuffle: we have long called for commercial boycotts, e.g. of advertisers with racist radio stations, as preferable to government regulation. At first blush it seems like the IIPM, however false their case and however toady and odious their tactics, were within their rights to threaten to protest at IBM/Lenovo.

But here’s the key difference. When we called for a boycott to get a racist DJ fired, we weren’t going after the DJ’s personal hobbies or his family. We were calling for it because of actions directly in the course of business, actively supported by the DJ’s employer.

In this case, the IIPM didn’t respond to the original article in JAM magazine directly. It didn’t talk with Gaurav Sabnis, the hobbyist blogger who merely cross-linked. It didn’t post a comment with a point by point refutation of the article. That’s what a credible response looks like.

It didn’t, in fact, backing up its assertions in any way whatsoever. Instead it went stalker by going after a completely unrelated party, his day job, his employer, and issuing filmi, melodramatic threats. Burning laptops? Please. That’s like the Indian college students who threaten self-immolation over a minor fee hike. The more nuclear and disproportionate the threat, the less credible, and IBM/Lenovo knows it.

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Breaking the Girl: IIPM’s Virtual Thugs Bully Rashmi Bansal

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This post is about IIPM‘s deplorable, misogynistic, retaliatory attacks on Rashmi Bansal, a female blogger who runs a magazine (JAM) which gave IIPM, a B-school in India, a less than stellar review. If you’d like, you can skip the Red Hot Chili Peppers lyrics and vignette below them; Rashmi’s story commences right before the jump.

:+:

Twisting and turning
Your feelings are burning
You’re breaking the girl
She meant you no harm
Think you’re so clever
But now you must sever
You’re breaking the girl…{rhcp}

:+:

After I finished my last degree, my next step–like every other desi who didn’t feel like going to medical school or being an engineer– was law school…or so I thought. I took Kaplan, took the LSAT and took obscene amounts of time filling out applications and writing essays, like everyone else who applied to be a 1L during the 2001-2002 school year.

My heart wasn’t in it.

I refused to go unless I was accepted at a school I loved because frankly, Mr. Shankly, I didn’t need to be a lawyer (and $100k in debt) that badly.

Out of the blue, I got a scholarship to a school I had no interest in…my Mom forced me to keep an open mind and at least visit it with her when she came east for my graduation.

“Fine, Mummy. For you, I will”, I said.

The materials made the campus sound fantastic; the truth was, ’twas a hole. I didn’t really hold it against them though– we all bullshit a little bit to make reality seem more fabulous. I’ll accept that proclivity– within limits.

Exactly a year later, when I was tending to my interns, I told them all about my experience with the law school suitor I had rejected. I felt like it was the right thing to do; almost half of them were in the process of applying themselves and a guest speaker who had graciously enriched their time with a speech was an Alum of the school I had found so hole-y. As I tried not to wince, he talked it up ridiculously. If I had had the time to blog during the summer of 2002, when I was working 70+ hour weeks, I would’ve told the world my story, in an honest, unflinching way. Aside from potentially getting flamed via comment, I wouldn’t have had anything to worry about, after posting my opinion.

Lucky me.

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Rashmi Bansal, the blogger behind “Youth Curry” runs Just Another Magazine or JAM. JAM did brown youngsters in the Amma-land a favor by discussing B-schools, a topic which must be quite popular judging by my daily updates from Rediff.com, which inevitably include an article on the subject.

Here’s what JAM had to say about IIPM, a somewhat controversial school that reminds me of that sleazy guy at the bar who talks a good game– i.e. they’re full of shit. The bar-scum doesn’t have a porsche and IIPM isn’t a 10 ten school which is better than IIM, in fact IIPM has been removed from B-school rankings for misrepresenting itself. Though I’m a St. Thomas Christian, I don’t have to go to a sleazy garage to place my hands in the hole where the ultimate daily driver should be nor do I have to visit one of the “plush” IIPMs to tell you that they lied, too. Some things, you just know are true. Continue reading →

Fault Lines can’t be controlled

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Every Geologist has the same macabre dream.  They want to be as close to the fault as possible when the big one hits.  Any geologist that tells you different is lying so as not to upset your sensibilities.  The first three months of this year I spent nearly every weekend camping in the rugged mountains near the San Andreas Fault while constructing a geological map of the area.  On every drive out the professor would smile devilishly and then say “maybe the Big One will hit this weekend.”

Previously I blogged about the extreme dangers of the world’s most unforgiving battlefield, high in the Siachen Glacier near the Line of Control in Kashmir (Manish followed up with some stats).  As if the hail of artillery rounds, machine-gun fire, and extreme cold weren’t enough, over the weekend the soldiers manning their outposts had to deal with a massive Earthquake almost directly beneath them.  How did those soldiers fair during the Earthquake?  That is a secret held close by both sides for good reason.  What men with guns can’t dislodge, an Earthquake can manage with ease.

ISLAMABAD: The Army General Headquarters has asked the Ministry of Water and Power to restore power to several sensitive military installations, which collapsed in the earthquake, along the Line of Control (LoC) in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), a government official told Daily Times.

The Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) was providing electricity to AJK from the Muzaffarabad Grid Station through a single point electricity provision system, while AJK Electricity Board was responsible for power distribution in the area.

The official said that the Muzaffarabad Grid Station supplied electricity to all sensitive military installations and pickets, but the earthquake has completely destroyed the system. [Link]

and on the Indian side:

Twenty-six security personnel, including 21 Army jawans, were killed and scores of others injured as the massive earthquake damaged bunkers and barracks along the Line of Control (LoC) in Baramulla, Kupwara and Poonch districts of Jammu and Kashmir today.

The Army has lost 21 soldiers due to bunkers caving in and damage to barracks along LoC in Rampur, Uri, Baramulla and Tangdhar sectors, a defence spokesman told PTI. [Link]

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