”Outsourcing” abortion to India

Posted on January 22, 2006 by Abhi

My title may be a bit inflammatory, but deservedly so I thing. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about India’s Lost Girls. The discussion that followed about the practice in India of gender selection through abortion, was quite interesting and evoked many strong opinions. It now seems that this practice has long since spread like a disease from the old world to the new. The Observer reports on its own investigation [link via Pickled Politics]:

… abortion of female foetuses has long been a part of life in Britain and The Observer has uncovered evidence that pregnant British Asian women, some in effect barred by the NHS after numerous abortions, are now coming to India for gender-defining ultrasounds and, if they are expecting girls, terminations…
…Ritu, 27, is fidgeting impatiently with her scarf. This mother of two children from Leicester has come to India while her husband, an engineer, has stayed with his family. With her is a cousin she barely knows. Ritu is just over 14 weeks pregnant. ‘I’m here because we were already coming on holiday to see relatives,’ she says quietly, motioning her cousin away. ‘I had an ultrasound here a few days ago. It cost about Â£20 and we found out I was having a girl. My mother-in-law suggested we aborted the baby because the family wants a boy, but insisted we do it in Delhi. I’ve had an abortion in the UK and she is worried the NHS won’t let it happen again; anyway, it is cheaper here – only Â£100 – and the doctors are excellent.’

Ritu says two of her aunts in Britain have had five abortions between them in their quest for a boy. Both were eventually refused ultrasound tests in Leicester and had them privately.

‘There are clinics in Leicester that won’t identify the sex of babies to Asian women. They have a policy, they say, so more British Asians are coming to India when they are pregnant to make sure everything goes to plan.

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Shiva and Durga in tag team smack down

Posted on January 22, 2006 by Abhi

My dad forwarded me the picture below. It is of a mural that serves as the centerpiece at the “Dharma Sansad,” a two day meeting at a Swaminarayan Temple at Vadtaal town near Ahmedabad, Gujarat. It is a meeting of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the ultra-conservative Hindu Nationalist group. Divine justice??

Durga takes care of Musharaaf and Shiva takes care of Osama Bin Laden

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Yeti kitsch

Posted on January 22, 2006 by manish

The Imagineers at Disney World in Florida have erected a mandir to the abominable snowman next to their new Himalayan-themed roller coaster. Expedition Everest opens in spring (via Boing Boing):

Yeti another mandir

The artificial mountain is not a reproduction of Mount Everest; it is the fictional “forbidden mountain” guarded by the yeti… One of the highlights of the attraction is an encounter with an enormous audio-animatronic yeti… Although moderate by contemporary roller-coaster standards, Expedition Everest is unique for having its trains travel forward and backward as a result of the yeti’s interference…

Riders approach the attraction through the remote village of Serka Zong in the fictional kingdom of Anandapur, which is located in the foothills of the Himalayas. Several village buildings that had been used by the Royal Anandapur Tea Company have been repurposed… the legend of the yeti is communicated vividly through a mandir… and a makeshift museum that documents yeti sightings, the yeti’s significance in Himalayan cultures and a so-called “lost” expedition that ran afoul of the yeti many years before… [Link]

Disney is taking over Times Square immediately after Valentine’s Day:

Disney plans to transform the exteriors of the W Hotel and the adjacent Argent building at Broadway and 47th Street into a gigantic backdrop of Mount Everest. An aerial acrobatic troupe will perform there Feb. 15 and 16 on a stage 57 stories high, rappelling down the mountain and coming face to face with a Himalayan yeti — the legendary abominable snowman. [Link]

I’ve never felt entirely at ease in simulacrum cities like Orlando and Vegas, miniature Matrices. There’s something odd about Imagineers daubing tilaks onto idols of yeti which look like ‘roid-crazed Hanumans, leaving offerings of plastic fruit and hanging a poster of Krishna stealing butter. Disney movies like Aladdin and Pocahontas often mince cultures into purposely inaccurate baby pap which plays to stereotype.

(And in the other direction of mashup done badly, I can’t stomach the weak-ass rap in Bollyflicks. French and Spanish rap has coalesced as the language of the barrios, but Little B rapping is as silly as Nic Cage going gangsta.)

But let’s not be yenta about yeti. At first glance, the props around this roller coaster look pretty cute. I love the hand-painted signs.

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If not Torino, then where?

Posted on January 21, 2006 by Abhi

The XXth Olympic Winter Games are just a few weeks away. Guess what? The U.S. team doesn’t have a single desi athlete representing? What gives? Aren’t there any Mohinis or Rajs out there that like the snow? There will be one desi participating at least:

Uday Joshi, SportsCenter [ESPN STAR Sports’] presenter will create history on January 18, 2006, by being the first man of Indian origin, to be one of the celebrity Torchbearers for the XXth Winter Olympics, which commenced in Genoa, Italy in December 2005…
On being part of the relay team, Uday Joshi, said “This is a big honor for me. I am personally very proud and happy to be a part of the relay. At the same time it is a very humbling experience to be suddenly pushed in an esteemed group of the biggest athletes in the world…” [Link]

In truth, I think there will be four athletes from India at the games (although I was hard pressed to find mention of them in the news). I couldn’t find any athletes from other South Asian countries, so perhaps readers can fill me in. The realization that even now in 2006 there are a dearth of desi athletes, has left me quite jaded. I took it upon myself to do something for my people, for South Asians both here and abroad. I searched the internet for an alternative. What could desis compete at AND have a chance to win at? The answer arrived a few days ago in my email inbox from my visionary friend Tushar:

Witness how he mocks us

The World Beard ChampionshipsNo brown people compete- it’s like the NBA before black people were allowed to play. Maybe five of us should enter…

Just hear me out people. Right now white folks DOMINATE this event. Just look at their website. Do you see a single brown face? The U.S. Beard Team even has their own blog. Yep. No desis. If I grew a beard I could kill a man with it in just one month. Its razor sharp texture makes for some lethal shit. Desis would absolutely dominate this competition. We’d be like the equivalent of the Kenyans in the marathon. I urge my people to rise up. Who will stand with me? Ennis? Amardeep? Vinod? If not now, then when?

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A knight’s tale

Posted on January 21, 2006 by manish

There comes a time in every knighted actor’s career when he descends from Oscar material to B-level creature feature. Ben Kingsley is the vampire king in Bloodrayne, yet another awful flick derived from a video game. After playing Fagin, he’s well into his monster oeuvre:

I vant to suck

German director Uwe Boll (“House of the Dead,” “Alone in the Dark”) is fast becoming known as one of the worst directors on the planet. Indeed, Boll’s films are archetypes of bad filmmaking… Yet he continues to license big-name videogame titles and turn them into movies with ever more impressive casts… Boll somehow lures an Oscar-nominated Knight of the British Order to play a character as ridiculous as the King of the Vampires. [Link]

If I wanted to watch a desi actor draining the life out of his victims, I’d go down to the local Bollyplex.

The video game: sex, death and subtlety

Some Folks are Just Too Sensitive

Posted on January 21, 2006 by vinod

An Oldie but not covered here before –

Angry youths in this Kerala capital Friday burnt an effigy of US President George W. Bush, not because they are anti-American but because he has named his cat India.

Members of the citizens group Prathikarana Vedi assembled before the Kerala assembly saying that Bush calling his cat India was an insult to the country.

“This is a disgrace to our great country and this has come from none other than US President George W. Bush. This is nothing but an insult to India because there are hundreds of thousands of Indians in US, and many who occupy key posts in the White House,” said M.A. Latheef, president of the group.

“He should make amends,” Latheef added.

The members of the group walked to the front gate of the assembly building but were stopped by police. After a brief speech and some slogans, the members burnt an effigy of the US president.

Behold the latest tool of post colonial oppression and humliation. In response to Bush’s callous racism, citizens’ group leader M.A. Latheef, speaking on behalf of 1 Billion desi’s decreed that he had named his girlfriend’s … err, wait, that’s too easy.

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Pakistan tries to suppress Muktar Mai again

Posted on January 21, 2006 by Ennis Singh Mutinywale

Once again, the Pakistani government has decided to show just how petty it is. Instead of respecting Mukhtar Mai’s courage, or even just looking the other way while she goes about her business, it has gone out of its way once again to block Mukhtar Mai from speaking.

Ms. Mai had long been scheduled to make an appearance called “An Interview With Mukhtar Mai: The Bravest Woman on Earth” in the United Nations television studios, sponsored by the office for nongovernmental organizations, the Virtue Foundation and the Asian-American Network Against Abuse of Human Rights.
But on Thursday night the organizers were informed that the program would have to be postponed because of Pakistan’s objections.
Ms. Mai is leaving New York on Saturday so the effect was to cancel her appearence [Link]

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Unhappily ever after

Posted on January 20, 2006 by manish

I’m astonished by the depth of the desi book market in the UK. I was at a store of Britbooks last week. It wasn’t even a real bookstore, it was an airport bookstore, and it was still amazingly well-stocked. If you’ve ever wondered why people call Brits polite, it’s all the time they spend buried in books (while their chavs and yobs whoop it up in da pub).

On the popular fiction shelves I saw a Granta book on India, an odd little compilation of highfalutin’ essays like a Bollysampler CD; several Hanif Kureishi titles; Shalimar the Clown; both of Meera Syal’s novels; Hari Kunzru; William Dalrymple’s White Mughals; Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide; and so on. (In Sevilla, I also saw a tiny book of Ghosh’s tsunami essays.) The chick lit section was chockablock with titles like Bindis and Brides by Nisha Minhas, in which an abusive desi guy tries to rape his estranged wife, and a white guy rescues her. Minhas previously wrote Passion and Poppadoms, Saris and Sins and Chapattis or Chips?, so she’s going for some kind of Nancy Drew mystery effect with alliteration in the titles.

I picked up a copy of Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy, a 1998 novella about marital egress and male sexual restlessness, and devoured it on the plane. The book supposedly caused an uproar when it was published; it reminds me of Rushdie’s Fury, a thinly-fictionalized account of leaving your wife and kids by a desi author who had just, well, left his wife and kids. But liberated of the need to be a full-blown novel, it’s a startlingly direct confession of a loveless, sexless marriage told like Portnoy’s Complaint, hands a-wringing and in the same plain yellow cover. It begins the day he decides to leave his wife. Kureishi’s stark emotional intensity comes off better than Fury, which IMO was Rushdie’s weakest after Grimus.

(Side note: According to the NYT, Shalimar the Clown had sold only 26,000 copies in the stores BookScan tracks as of December. Edward Champion points an accusing finger at the less-than-sonorous title: ‘If I were Rushdie’s publisher, I would have urged Rushdie to come up with a title that didn’t involve clowns at all… Shalimar the Clown? Not really a lot of enigma there. You may as well call the book Joe the Barber.’)

NSFW quotes from Intimacy after the jump.

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Badmash, Drew Carey, Sheetal Sheth, and Karma

Posted on January 20, 2006 by Abhi

Last night I went to the sold out Badmash Comedy Night in West Hollywood. The Badmash guys (Sanjay Shah, Sandeep Sood, Nimesh Patel, and Aron Bothman) are going to be putting on a recurring comedy night in LA (next one is on February 9th), which brings together both South Asian and non-South Asian comics. This is a smart mix. Audiences get tired of a whole night full of desi comedy, with only desi “insider” jokes. The comics end up competing with each other over who will use the same hackneyed “aunty joke” first. Some of the best new South Asian comics that perform here in LA are already moving away from such played-out routines. Their jokes are well balanced and appeal to a general audience, which is key for long term success. Badmash is trying to foster this new talent.

Continue reading this post to learn the sad real life story behind this picture

Sanjay was recently quoted in a Newsweek article about young comics using the internet to launch their careers:

[The internet] has also allowed Sanjay Shah, 28, and his friends to find an audience unserved by traditional TV. For the last few years, their weekly South Asian-themed animations–like an Indian spoof of “The Simpsons” ‘s opening theme–have drawn millions of visitors to his site, Badmash.org. “I look at the Internet right now as the incubator, the RD department for traditional channels,” Shah says.

I actually attended the comedy night as “Press.” One problem. The batteries in my camera died just as the show began. THIS folks is why I am a mere blogger and not a journalist. I’d make a sorry excuse of a journalist. It was quite unfortunate, because none other than Sheetal Sheth was in the audience. The night was co-sponsored by Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which was plugged throughout the night. Also performing was a surprise guest. Mr. Cleveland himself, Drew Carey, was in the house. His jokes are a lot dirtier in person than you would think from watching him on television. Comedian Jo Koy was on fire. Good stuff.

As much as I complain about life in LA, THIS is why I do like living here. Everyone desi you meet in LA has a thing that they do on the side. They have their main job, career, or way to pay the bills, and then they have their “side thing.” The truly brave ones make their “side thing” their main thing. I’ve always felt that life would suck unless you have “a side thing,” going at all times. You should, at all moments of your life, be pursuing something that you will probably fail at. Speaking of which…

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Reminder – NYC Meetup – Sat, Jan 21, 1pm @ Kati Roll

Posted on January 20, 2006 by vinod

A quick reminder – the NYC Mutineer Meetup is less than 24 hours away. On tap – 2 blog geeks and a blog diva – Vinod, Manish & Anna (you figure out who’s who) and other mutineers / commentors / readers / lurkers of various stripes.