Monthly Archives: January 2006

Sing-sing

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On the ferry from Spain to Morocco, I had my ear bent for several hours by a friendly Moroccan bloke, as they tend to be. It was either that, or coming out of stealth mode and joining the Americans listening to an Aussie English teacher yap nonstop for four hours. The job selects for strong lungs. Between broken English, a smattering of French and German, and long phrases in Mime, the fellow now residing in Germany kept the ferry crossing lively.

‘You… sing?’ he ventured cautiously.

‘Uh… not really,’ I replied.

‘I two Indian friend. They sing,’ he said.

‘Qawwali?’ I asked. The universal gesture of ‘WTF are you talking about?,’ palms upturned. ‘North Indian, they sing,’ he told me.

Why yes, I suppose we do.

‘Prime minister sing. First time!’ he said. Ahhh… got it. Singh. Turban, not pipes. His ululatory fixation now made a lot more sense.

He proceeded to tell me about his friends in Germany. ‘Sing crazy for whiskey!’ Yeah, yeah, Ustad Walker and his famous school of blended malt scotch. He told me with no small admiration that he’d seen a grown man down a full liter of whiskey and show up the next morning with no ill effect. He said that Germany is recruiting Indians because they are the computer caste.

We compared the etymologies of words from Arabic and Farsi which show up in Turkish and Hindu/Urdu, such as kitap (book), maidaan (plaza) and duniya (world). He said he wasn’t religious, ‘religion politics, only makes trouble,’ but was visiting his family for Eid-ul-Adha. He mimed ram horns, slitting the beast’s throat, and asked how you translate Lucifere from French.

The rest of the encounter got weird.

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Containment

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In the ’60s, the U.S. Department of Defense grew increasingly worried about containing the USSR and funded departments of South Asian Studies at many American universities. Ironically, many of the beneficiaries of the grants were exactly the kind of free spirits that granite-cut DoD types abhorred. As time went on, this faculty started facing 2nd gen desis asking to learn about modern South Asia rather than psychosexual analyses of Radha-Krishna, and asking for native language instructors rather than those one step phonetically removed.

Today the Hindoo Peril arises anew, and this time around it’s that the Axis of Non-English has imbibed capitalism too deeply (thanks, Joby):

President Bush is asking for Congress for $114 million in next yearÂ’s budget to push Americans into uncharted linguistic territory under what is being called “National Security Language Initiative…” Hindi has been identified as one of the critical foreign languages that Americans need to learn… Americans are also being urged to study Farsi, Arabic, Chinese and other languages… [Link]

Note the clumping of the language of potential military enemies with economic competitors. OTOH, since oil supply is an economic chokepoint, maybe it’s all about dem billz over at Larnin’ ’bout Furriners, Part Deux.

Hey, you might even get a Tamil, Gujarati or Telugu class resurrected out of this. All in the name of knowing the ‘enemy,’ of course 😉 Continue reading →

Make the trip worth it

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The annual South Asian Student Alliance (SASA) conference begins next weekend. I think that SM bloggers and quite a few of our readers have made it pretty clear what little respect we have left for SASA, which seems to have lost its way (see previous posts 1,2). If you are a student who has not yet arrived at the conclusion that we have, and you have decided to attend next weekend, then I have a critical mission for you. I believe that there exists a way in which you can make the trip to New York worth it. The SASA conference will once again hold a Bone Marrow Drive. Make sure that you take the time to give just a few drops of your blood.

Thursday Jan 12th: 1:00pm – 10:00pm
Friday Jan 13th: 10:00am – 10:00pm

Ballroom Floor
At The New Yorker Hotel
481 8th Avenue at 34th Street
New York City

Take a look at these faces…they are just like you and me! Look at the fellow South Asians and ask why can’t we save them and help many more, who are likely to be in same situation in the future. It does not matter if you are from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh; it does not matter if you are Hindu, Moslem, Christian or Jain. What matters is, that we all share the same genetic pool, and we save each others life!

You can probably show up for the drive even if you aren’t there for the conference. Need more motivation? Help Save Ashish:

Ashish has undergone a great deal of suffering since first admitted at Texas Children’s hospital on September 26, 2005. He has been in and out of the hospital, first admitted at Texas Children’s hospital on September 26, 2005. requiring transfusions, fighting infections, undergoing bone marrow biopsy’s and surgeries. He has to check his blood levels every week and needs transfusions regularly. In spite of the pain he has gone through he has an incredible inner strength that is portrayed in his beaming smile and good nature. While we pray for a miracle his only medical hope for survival is a bone marrow transplant.

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God is a DJ

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I used to think the urge to convert mosques into temples was an obsession peculiar to Hindutva types. But Córdoba, Spain makes it ok to have rapacious religionists in your cultural closet.

As I posted last, the mountain fortress of La Alhambra looks Spanish on the outside, Mughal on the inside. But the Mezquita cathedral in Córdoba is the reverse, a Moorish mosque converted into a cathedral.

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Lady in Red

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I am in India right now, “helping” my baby sister with her preparations for her impending nuptuals. This is what a bridal show looks like, Indian style :

Does this lehnga make my hips look large?

[Excuse the photoblogging – it’s hard to get the peace and quiet necessary to string two words together around here and the DSL is unreliable to boot.]

UPDATE: The photo above was taken at Frontier (sic) Bazar in Karol Bagh, Delhi. My sister bought none of the lehngas above, they were being shown to somebody else (and most Sikh weddings are done in Salvaar Kameez suits, which is what she bought). She did, however, buy her suit material at Frontier, which she heartily endorses, after having done the tour of most of the South-Ex boutiques (selection is small, and unless you want what is in fashion at that moment you’re out of luck).

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Gonna Buy Me Some Edumacation

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It’s been said that when it comes to Capitalism, the Poor often have much to teach the Rich. And if there’s one place where the Poor are a veritable petri dish of experimentation, it’s India. Marginal Revolution has an interesting series of posts on the emergence of private education in this sector of da homeland. They quote a Washington Post column by Sebastian Mallaby who cites a growth story of nearly Google-esque proportions –

Vellore is a small town in southern India, poor enough for some of its buildings to have thatched roofs rather than the rain-proof metal sort. Until a few years ago Vellore was notable only for its large Christian medical center, erected with the help of foreign money. But now it has sprouted this 9,000-student technical college, complete with a sports stadium, an incubator for start-up high-tech businesses and a bio-separation lab.

…The college started out in 1984 with just 180 students…In 2005 India produced 200,000 engineering graduates, about three times as many as the United States and twice as many as all of Europe. But the really astonishing statistic is this: In 2005 India enrolled fully 450,000 students in four-year engineering courses, meaning that its output of engineers will more than double by 2009.

The lesson for other developing nations? The role of private education –

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This post has nothing to do with the Kama Sutra

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A couple of you (thanks Eric) have sent us an article out today in the New York Times that follows up on the incident of the women police officers beating up on canoodling couples in an Indian park. At first I hesitated to even blog that story because it seemed like on of those “only in India” type off-beat news stories. Apparently though, it has caused a national uproar:

From the political right and left came condemnation of the police action. Brinda Karat, the most prominent woman representing a coalition of leftist parties in government, denounced the police for pouncing on courting couples while violent rapes remain unsolved. Sushma Swaraj, a legislator from the Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, took the podium in Parliament and called it a product of “a sick mind.” [Link]

Former SM pin-up girl PG writes not about the story, but about the headline of the article in the New York Times:

This appears to be the rare occasion on which I can criticize the NYT’s India coverage before any of the bloggers at SM does.

“Is Public Romance a Right? The Kama Sutra Doesn’t Say”

has got to be one of the stupidest Orientalist headlines I’ve seen on the Times. The actual content of the story, written by Somini Sengupta with additional reporting by Hari Kumar, mentions absolutely nothing about the Kama Sutra.

Well PG, with Manish (our anti-Orientalist headline critic) out of the country we are glad that you caught it. I wonder if the Times keeps stats on whether it gets more hits on news stories that have “Kama Sutra” in the headline.

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The best weapon in the “War on Terror”…

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…is kindness. A poll last month in Pakistan (conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow) makes even more clear a notion that we have alluded to before on a couple of occasions [1,2]. If the U.S. wants a cost effective way of attacking terrorism at its root, then kill them with kindness. Just look at what happened when we decided to divert a few helicopters from Afghanistan to the quake ravaged regions of Pakistan. New America Media reports on the poll results:

So much for the popularly peddled view that anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is so pervasive and deep-rooted it might take generations to alter. A new poll from Pakistan, one of the most critical front lines in the war on terror, paints a very different picture — by revealing a sea change in public opinion in recent months.

Long a stronghold for Islamic extremists and the world’s second most populous Muslim nation, Pakistanis now hold a more favorable opinion of the US than at any time since 9/11, while support for al Qaeda in its home base has dropped to its lowest level since then. The direct cause for this dramatic shift in Muslim opinion is clear: American humanitarian assistance for Pakistani victims of the Oct. 8 earthquake that killed at least 87,000. The US pledged $510 million for earthquake relief in Pakistan and American soldiers are playing a prominent role in rescuing victims from remote mountainous villages.

Key Findings of Terror Free Tomorrow Poll in Pakistan [partial list]:

• 73% of Pakistanis surveyed now believe suicide terrorist attacks are never justified, up from 46% just last May.
• Support for Osama Bin Laden has declined significantly (51% favorable in May 2005 to just 33% in November), while those who oppose him rose from 23% to 41%.
• US favorabilty among Pakistanis has doubled from 23% in May to more than 46% now, while the percentage of Pakistanis with very unfavorable views declined from 48% to 28%.
• For the first time since 9/11, more Pakistanis are now favorable to the United States than unfavorable.
• 78% of Pakistanis have a more favorable opinion of the United States because of the American response to the earthquake, with the strongest support among those under 35.

The full poll has additional key findings and what the pollsters feel are the critical implications of the results. We now have two dramatic data points in less than a year. When America went in after the tsunami our reputation skyrocketed with the Indonesian people, and now this news from Pakistan. Continue reading →