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gwen or ganesh?

Fresh from the little red phone which rings whenever I get a tip:

This is probably the stupidest ‘tip’ I’ve ever sent to a blog, but…If you look at the cover of Gwen Stefani’s latest album, and sort of squint your eyes, doesn’t it look just like a picture of Ganesha’s head? Am I nuts, or do others see this too?

Hmmm. How many other blogs you tippin’? How long has THAT been going on? 😉 Anyway, I’ve squinted enough that I now need creme de la mer eye balm, but I still don’t see it. Don’t be surprised though– I could NEVER see the “hidden” pictures in those magic-eye-annoying posters, either.

And the rest of you lot? Is our “anon” nuts or do you see the face of a beloved deity, too? Continue reading

Guess who’s NOT coming to dinner

By now most people have heard about the U.S. airstrike in a remote section of Pakistan on Friday. Immediately after the airstrike of a house where a dinner party (which may have been celebrating Eid al-Adha) was taking place, there were whispers that that among the dead may have been Al Qaeda’s number two himself, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was the intended target. By yesterday morning officials were saying that the initial missile (probably launched by an unmanned Predator) must have just missed his departure, or perhaps he hadn’t shown up yet. Today all hell has broken loose:

U.S. television networks CNN and ABC cited sources saying that unmanned U.S. drones had fired missiles at the village of Damadola, some 200 kilometers northwest of Islamabad. Their target: top Al-Qaeda figures believed to be in the area, including Osama bin Laden’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Those reports said it’s possible al-Zawahiri was killed in the strike. If officially confirmed, al-Zawahiri would be the most senior Al-Qaeda figure captured or killed so far.

However, unnamed senior officials in Pakistan told Reuters and AP that al-Zawahiri was not present at the site of the attack.

And angry villagers in Damadola have also denied al-Zawahiri was there and thousands were today protesting the strike in a nearby town. [Link]

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The blog formerly known as Sepia Mutiny

As you may have heard, last month Bangalore decided to change its name to Bengaluru, a contraction of a Kannada phrase, ‘benda kaal ooru,’ which means ‘city of boiled beans.’

We here at the Mutiny fully support casting off the linguistic corruption of the oppressor. We raise our henna’d fists in solidarity and announce the following:

Sepia Mutiny shall henceforth be known as Faärtinfernø, which means ‘blog of hopeless flames.’

Anyone visiting us in North Dakota must use the new name, or their luggage will wind up lost.

Anyone using the old name will be refused entry into places of worship for being insufficiently brown.

We are spending 900 kajillion dollars to update our signs and stationery. That leaves us nothing to fix our traffic jams, deteriorating infrastructure and inadequate power and bandwidth for our technology operations, but our readers will be happy knowing that we’re spending our time on what really matters.

All blog business will be conducted in our native language: uninformed bloviation, semantic squabbles, unfunny jokes, incomprehensible literary references, tales of virility, meandering personal stories and poli-sci-theory put-downs which nobody gets.

We apologize for this radical change.

To more fully throw off the yoke of the oppressor, every post will be written in our ancient script of Chefspeak.

Yørn desh born, desh born Yørn, børk! børk! børk!

Related post: The tyranny of a transposition typo

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Incendiary writing

Time Magazine’s Asia edition writes a favorable review of the new book by Amitav Ghosh titled, Incendiary Circumstances : A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times:

…moments of collapse, when the writer realizes what he cannot do–and what he has to do, as a citizen–are the center of the roaming anthropologist’s new collection of essays, Incendiary Circumstances. The title comes from a piece in which Ghosh, sitting at his desk in Delhi, working on his first novel, in 1984, suddenly sees the tranquil world around him go up in flames in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Hours before, he was just another student and aspiring author, hovering over his notebook in a part of Delhi called Defence Colony; overnight, he becomes an activist of sorts, going out into the streets to shout Gandhian slogans with the other everyday citizens trying to quell the riots.

It is part of Ghosh’s curious luck that he often seems to be in the thick of things: he was a schoolboy in Sri Lanka just before civil war broke up the island, and he was living in rural Egypt when villagers around him started going to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in search of jobs. He was in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. The disappearance of seeming paradises has been his lifelong companion. More than that, though, he is an amphibian of sorts who knows what it is to be both witness and victim.

Reading the review I was reminded a little of this question I posed to Manish just a few days ago. When is the time to write about and discuss an issue over, and the time to to either act on it or walk away at hand? Sometimes writing can inspire the cause that will produce a needed effect. Ghosh seems to focus on this balance.

Faced by those rioters in Delhi in 1984, some women stood up to them and, miraculously, reversed the tide of violence. Following the destruction of their country by the Khmer Rouge, a handful of survivors in Cambodia in 1981 put on a dance performance, piecing their lives together like “rag pickers.” Writers have to be solitaries, Ghosh recalls V.S. Naipaul saying, and yet, he seems to feel, to be useful they have to be participants, too.

Incendiary Circumstances traces, over and over, the perfidy of empires and the corruption of most governments, but it never loses sight of individual action and power. And navigating both sides of the shadow lines within him, Ghosh travels to some of the most difficult places on earth to bring their voices back to those in places of seeming comfort.

See Amardeep’s review of Ghosh’s previous book, The Hungry Tide.

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The Boomerang effect

Earlier this week a SM tipster (thanks Ami) sent us word of this article in Time Magazine that does a pretty good job of examining the second generation Asian American experience:

The American story is, of course, made up of successive influxes of immigrants who arrive in the U.S., struggle to find a place in its society and eventually assimilate. But the group of post-1965 Asians was different from the Jews, Irish and Italians who had landed earlier. The Asian immigrants’ distinctive physiognomy may have made it more difficult for them to blend in, but at the same time, their high education and skill levels allowed them quicker entrée into the middle class. Instead of clustering tightly in urban ethnic enclaves, they spread out into suburbia, where they were often isolated. And it was there that their kids, now 20 to 40 years old, grew up, straddling two worlds–the traditional domain their recently arrived parents sought to maintain at home and the fast-changing Western culture of the society outside the front door. The six people at the New York City dinner are members of that second generation and–full disclosure–so are we, the authors of this article.

In the paragraph above you see a very concise reason for why the experience of South Asian immigrants living in the U.S. is different from those living in European countries, and totally different from those living elsewhere abroad. The fact that immigrants here spread to isolated suburbs helped them assimilate more quickly, while at the same time encouraging them to embrace inclusiveness by identifying with other immigrant populations.

If you were to draw a diagram of acculturation, with the mores of immigrant parents on one side and society’s on the other, the classic model might show a steady drift over time, depicting a slow-burn Americanization, taking as long as two or three generations. The more recent Asian-American curve, however, looks almost like the path of a boomerang: early isolation, rapid immersion and assimilation and then a re-appreciation of ethnic roots.

I enjoyed this article because I felt that they were describing my own experience quite accurately.

As a child growing up in Pennington, N.J., Fareha Ahmed watched Bollywood videos and enthusiastically attended the annual Pakistan Independence Day Parade in New York City. By middle school, though, her parents’ Pakistani culture had become uncool. “I wanted to fit in so bad,” Ahmed says. For her, that meant trying to be white. She dyed her hair blond, got hazel contact lenses and complained, “I’m going to smell,” when her mom served fragrant dishes like lamb biryani for dinner. But at Villanova University in Philadelphia, Ahmed found friends from all different backgrounds who welcomed diversity and helped her, she says, become “a good balance of East meets West.” Now 23, she and her non-Asian roommates threw a party to mark the Islamic holiday ‘Id al-Fitr in November, then threw another for Christmas–which her family never celebrated. “I chose to embrace both holidays instead of segregating myself to one,” she says.

Asian Americans say part of the reason it is so hard to reach an equilibrium is that they are seen as what sociologists call “forever foreigners.” Their looks lead to a lifetime of questions like “No, where are you really from?”

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Ninety-nine bottles of beer

The origins of India pale ale are similar to those of Bombay gin, which was mixed with quinine to combat malaria, in that there’s a real, tropical reason for the name:

After the British East India Company had established itself in India… it had a large number of troops and civilians demanding beer… Ships typically left London, cruised south past the equator along the coast of Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and then crossed the Indian Ocean to reach Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. The temperature fluctuations were huge, it was a very long trip (about 6 months) and the rough waters of southern Africa resulted in an extremely violent voyage…

Early shipments to India contained bottled porters, the favorite beer in London, which generally arrived flat, musty, and sour… Hodgson took his pale ale recipe, increased the hop content considerably, and raised the alcohol content. The result was a very bitter, alcoholic, and sparkling pale ale that could survive the challenges of travel and shelf life in India. [Link]

High hop levels can preserve a beer’s flavor in two ways: they have a limited ability to protect beer from spoilage by some microorganisms, and, more importantly, their bitterness can mask stale flavors. While the beer arriving in India would certainly have suffered from oxidative staling during the long voyage, it could still taste acceptable because of the masking effect of alcohol and hops. [Link]

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Pirate of the Caribbean

After reading the tale of John Boysie Singh, 20th-century Trini pirate of the Caribbean, methinks Keira teams up with Parminder again, maties:

Johnny Dhillon?

John Boysie Singh, usually known as “the Rajah,” “Boysie” or “Boysie Singh” … had a long and successful career as a gangster and gambler before turning to piracy and murder. For almost ten years, from 1947 until 1956 he and his gang terrorized the waters between Trinidad and Venezuela. They were responsible for the deaths of many fishermen — the number has sometimes been put as high as 400. Their technique was generally to board fishing boats, murder their crew, and steal the engine which they would later sell in nearby Venezuela after sinking the boat.

Boysie was well-known to everyone in Trinidad. He had successfully beaten two charges of murder before he was finally executed after losing his third case. He was held in awe and dread by most of the population and was frequently seen strolling grandly about Port of Spain in the early 1950s wearing bright, stylish clothes. Mothers and nannies would warn their charges: “Behave yourself, man, or Boysie goyn getchu, oui!” [Link]

“Bhagrang Singh, his father, came from de Punjab. He was a member of the Hindu tribe dey call de Chutri; a tribe dat was known for its bravery in war. While he was in India, Bhagrang Singh kill a man of high rank and run to Trinidad to save he neck. He didn’t come here and call heself Maharaj for people to tink he was Brahmin. He was a warrior. When he came to Trinidad he brought wid him a cavalry saber made of fine steel. Artistically, the handle of the saber was shape into a falcon’s head with red stones for eyes. Dat was de warrior in he…

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Blowback Mountain

The latest foreign affairs crisis is the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran. The country broke seals on uranium enrichment facilities this week, making it clear it intends to build nukes. Iran’s mullahcrats sometimes make Kim Jong-Il sound like Mr. Rogers:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, gets fresh with a supporter

One of Iran’s most influential ruling clerics [Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani] called Friday on the Muslim states to use nuclear weapon against Israel, assuring them that while such an attack would annihilate Israel, it would cost them “damages only”. [Link]

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has described the Holocaust as “a myth” and suggested that Israel be moved to Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska… Ahmadinejad sparked widespread international condemnation in October when he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map…”

“There is a perception, based on past experience that only when Iran threatens and pushes does the West back off,” he told Reuters. [Link]

Which responsible, nuclear-armed military put nukes in the hands of nutty madrassa grads? Do you even have to ask?

The Iranians turned over the names of their suppliers and international inspectors quickly identified the Iranian centrifuges as Pak-1s, the model developed by Khan in the early 1980s. [Link]

The CIA report is the first to assert that the designs provided to Iran also included those for weapons “components.” [Link]

Nature has given it all the raw uranium it needs. With help from the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, it has acquired uranium enrichment centrifuges and possibly a workable bomb design. And thanks to its ample oil reserves, it has the means to withstand all but the most sweeping and universally enforced sanctions. [Link]

Khan was hardly ‘rogue’:

“One thing we do know is that this was not a rogue operation… How do you get missiles from North Korea to Pakistan? Do you think A.Q. shipped all the centrifuges by Federal Express? The military has to be involved, at high levels.” The intelligence officer went on, “We had every opportunity to put a stop to the A. Q. Khan network fifteen years ago…” “This is not a few scientists pocketing money and getting rich. It’s a state policy.
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Bobby Jindal: ustad of Indian culture

Rep. Bobby Jindal led a delegation of members of Congress to meet with Manmohan Singh today to discuss the India-U.S. nuclear cooperation agreement. Indian MPs laid the smack down on U.S. support for the Pakistani military:

They were shown the precise spots in the Indian parliament building that bore the brunt of terrorist attacks Dec 13, 2001, to underscore India’s continuing battle against terrorism. [Link]

… Indian MPs raised the issue of cross-border terrorism allegedly supported by Pakistan. One MP questioned the Congressmen on US double standards in dealing with Pakistan, which was not moving fast enough towards democracy, sources said. [Link]

Jindal was last seen comparing and contrasting the dhol technique of Tigerstyle vs. the duggis of Tabla Beat Science: Jindal was seen explaining the finer points of Indian culture to colleagues

The 34-year-old Jindal, whose parents migrated from Punjab and who narrowly lost the 2003 gubernatorial race in Louisiana, was seen explaining the finer points of Indian culture to his US Congress colleagues. [Link]

Southern India noticed a pocket of hot air which raised temperatures across the region:

Influential US Senator and former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who is currently in India, has lauded the “remarkable transformation” taking place in India. “India and the US are at the centre of an economic revolution,” Kerry said here on Thursday before he left for Hyderabad. [Link]

Off the record, the BJP gave Republicans tips on dealing with the Abramoff scandal. First lesson: don’t take a bribe for any question mentioning Sepia Mutiny of Britain.

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