Monthly Archives: March 2006

Pour some out for Addwaitya this weekend

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From the SM newswire (thanks Aninda) we learn sad news of the passing of “the one and only,” possibly the last living witness to the original Sepoy Mutiny of 1857:

Rest in peace now homey, there’s a heaven for a G

A giant tortoise, thought to be more than 250 years old, has died of liver failure in Calcutta, India.

Named Addwaitya, which means the One and Only in Bengali, he had a long and storied history that goes back to the early days of the British colonial empire.

Historical records show he was caught by British sailors in the Seychelles Islands and carried to India where he was presented to Robert Clive, a rising star in the British East-India company. West Bengal Forest Minister Jogesh Barman said he spent many years on Clive’s estate before he retired to the local zoo in Calcutta about 130 years ago. [Link]

Interestingly the Times of India titles its article about Addwaitya’s passing, “Tortoise that saw Sepoy Mutiny dies.” Now because I blog for Sepia Mutiny I am going to eat that headline right up and not challenge it by pointing out that turtles usually don’t get caught up in insurrection or survey the ranks of the enemy.

The minister said details about Addwaitya’s early life showed that British sailors had brought him from the Seychelles islands and presented him to Clive, who was rising fast in the East India Company’s military hierarchy.

On Thursday, the tortoise’s enclosure wore a deserted look.

“This is a sad day for us. We will miss him very much,” a zoo keeper said. [Link]

Addwaitya was an Aldabra tortoise:

They are generally shy, though when agitated they often release a foul-smelling, musky liquid that can be targeted at enemies from up to 3 feet away. [Link]

We’ve actually been looking for a pet to guard our bunker.

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The Lobby

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One of the power dynamics that the U.S.-India nuclear-power deal will illuminate, is that between the Indian American community and Congress. How much power do “we” really have? Maybe a better question is who exactly are “we?” I have detailed in past posts my frustration over the fact that arguably the most powerful Indian American lobbying group, USINPAC, always steps up to represent the interests which matter most to the first generation, but largely fails to advocate my more mainstream issues and interests as a second generation Indian American. USINPAC is lobbying almost as hard as the government of India in support of this deal.

India is not solely depending on diplomacy to win the U.S. Congress’ backing for its civilian nuclear cooperation deal with Washington but also taking the help of lobbyists, a media report said…

A U.S.-based media organization reported that in the last fall, long before the visit of President George W Bush to India, the Indian Embassy in Washington had signed up two lobbying firms to “sell the deal”.

The Embassy has signed a $700,000 contract with Barbour, Griffith and Rogers, an outfit led by Robert Blackwill, U.S ambassador to India from 2001 to 2003, it said.

Besides, the Embassy is also paying $600,000 to Venable, a firm that “boasts” of former Democratic Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana as its point man. [Link]

And in case there was ever any doubt, lobbying is what makes things happen in Congress:

Six Republican senators endorsed the U.S.-India nuclear-power deal, as more than 20 foreign-policy specialists, including three former ambassadors to South Asia, urged Congress to approve the agreement.

Sens. George Allen of Virginia, Sam Brownback of Kansas, John Cornyn of Texas, Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Ted Stevens of Alaska bring a wide range of influence to the effort to win congressional approval of the agreement signed by President Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, according to the U.S. India Political Action Committee (USINPAC). [Link]

“This is an historic step for both countries and USINPAC stands with President Bush and Prime Minister Singh in moving this process forward. In fact, for the past eight months, USINPAC has aggressively worked to get key Members of Congress on board and we will not rest until this agreement is signed into law,” said Sanjay Puri, the Chairman of USINPAC. [Link]

On a related note, Indolink.com recently had a good article summarizing a 2004 paper titled: Subcontinental Divide Asian Indians and Asian American Politics by Wendy K. Tam Cho and Suneet P. Lad (subscription required for full paper). Cho and Lad examined both the facts and the myths of Indian American political power as judged by campaign contributions among other factors. Continue reading →

We’ve got a live one!

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We’ve got a new inductee for the Exotica Hall of Shame. This Chicago Sun-Times review of a new Chicago pop opera called Sita Ram is out to set some kind of density record for exotica-spew on Desilandia (thanks, WGIIA):

Adding to the spicy flavor are Scott C. Neale’s brilliantly colored street signs of India, Mara Blumenfeld’s curry-tinted costumes (many imported from India), Chris Binder’s deft lighting, plus shadow puppets and exotic instruments. There are moments when it feels like you are watching a traveling troupe that has set up shop in the center of an Indian village, and you half expect a cow or water buffalo to wander through. [Link]

I see that Jai Uttal is involved in this project. Say no more.

“Sita Ram” is the creation of director-writer David Kersnar and Grammy-nominated composer and co-lyricist Jai Uttal… [Link]

Hedy Weiss, you are dead to me

Related posts: Sakina’s Restaurant, Anatomy of a genre, M-m-me so hungry, Buzzword bingo

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Noonan & Freedom at Midnight

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Long-time mutineer KXB points us at a wonderfully written column by Peggy Noonan with her reflections on the classic Freedom at Midnight and its lessons as we grapple with Iraq –

I have been reading “Freedom at Midnight,” the popular classic of 30 years ago that recounted the coming of democracy to India. The authors, journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, capture the end of the Raj with sweep and drama, and manage to make even the dividing of India and Pakistan–I mean the literal drawing of the lines between the two countries, by a British civil servant–riveting. But the sobering lesson of this history, the big thing you bring away, is this: They didn’t know.

Mountbatten and Nehru and Jinnah were brilliant men who’d not only experienced a great deal; they’d done a great deal, and yet they did not know that the Subcontinent–which each in his own way, and sometimes it was an odd way, loved–would explode in violence, that bloodlust would rule as soon as the Union Jack was lowered.

…The only one who knew what was coming was Gandhi, mystic, genius and eccentric, who drove the other great men crazy by insisting on living among and ministering to the poor, the nonelite. He knew their hearts. He had given his life for a free and independent India but opposed partition and feared the immediate chaos it would bring. He spent the eve of Independence mourning. Six months later he was dead.

What follows is a wonderful, treatise one of the perils of leadership – distance. Noonan reminds us that elites across societies and throughout history walk a fine line between leading people to a better future vs. the folly of trying to impose a possibly unattainable ideal.

And yet, it’s an intrinsic curse of humanity that excess in the service of progress will always be a risk. The only surefire way to avoid any cost is to nihilistically abandon the quest itself.

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Beards are back!

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Don’t blink or you might miss my 15 seconds of being hip and cool, but the Grey Lady’s fashion section informs us that the hottest look today is a full beard:

A bearded Ralph Lauren model. I look just like him, but more handsome, and with brown skin and a turban.

At hipster hangouts and within fashion circles, the bearded revolution that began with raffishly trimmed whiskers a year or more ago has evolved into full-fledged Benjamin Harrisons. At New York Fashion Week last month at least a half-dozen designers turned up with furry faces… [at] the John Bartlett show… more than half the models wore beards: untidy ones that scaled a spectrum from wiry to ratty to shabby to fully bushy. [Link]

Wow. For the last three decades, Americans have seen the beard as anathema. The very word means a person who diverts suspicion from someone in both the contexts of betting and sexual orientation. To grow a beard is seen as dishonest, or at the very least, career suicide:

… [A] study in Australia showed that 92% of women and 79% of men would rather not work with people who have facial hair. It also found that senior managers think beards make men look shifty, unattractive and too old. [Link]

Remember Al Gore? He grew a beard to signal the fact that he was a private person who had left public life, and he shaved it to signify that he was once again a political actor. Unlike in India, the American public doesn’t trust a bearded politician:

The last president to sport a mustache was William Taft, who served from 1909 to 1913, while the last bearded president, Benjamin Harrison, left office in 1893. [Link]

We have female senators and black senators, but we do not have a bearded senator… I believe that we will have a female president and a black president before we have another bearded president. [Link]

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“U.K.’s Highest Court Backs School Ban on Muslim Dress”

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In 2000, a Muslim girl named Shabina Begum enrolled in Denbigh High School in Luton, England. The school required students to wear uniforms, and the uniforms were developed in consideration of the fact that approximately 80% of the students at Denbigh were Muslim:

In devising a suitable uniform, the school went to immense trouble to accommodate the religious and cultural preferences of the pupils and their families. There was consultation with parents, students, staff and the Imams of the three local mosques. One version of the uniform was the shalwar kameez (or kameeze), a sleeveless smock-like dress with a square neckline, worn over a shirt, tie and loose trousers which taper at the ankles. [Link]

In accordance with her religious beliefs and consistent with the school’s uniform requirements, Shabina wore a salwar kameez, or “shalwar kameez” as noted above. She did so for the first two years of her time at Denbigh. However, she later determined that the salwar kameez would not be appropriate for her to wear.

Her brother Shuweb Rahman says that “as Shabina became older she took an increasing interest in her religion” and through her interest in religion “discovered that the shalwar kameez was not an acceptable form of dress for Muslim women in public places.” [In 2002, Shabina] turned up at school wearing a long shapeless black gown known as a jilbab. [Link]

The school’s response? The assistant head master told Shabina to “go home and change.” She went home and never came back.

Shabina sued, claiming that her freedom to manifest her religion was violated. Yesterday, five Law Lords unanimously disagreed, holding that

there was no interference with the respondent’s [i.e., Shabina’s] right to manifest her belief in practice or observance. [Link]

The Lords apparently reasoned, in part, that Shabina could have simply gone to another school nearby that had a more suitable uniform policy:

there were three schools in the area at which the wearing of the jilbab was permitted…. There is, however, no evidence to show that there was any real difficulty in her attending one or other of these schools…. [Link]

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Pranav and the Bee

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pranav.jpgSomething smells down in Georgia and young Pranav Mahadevan is being forced to take a deep breath of the stink in. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports on an exclusive investigation which takes a look at the seedy underbelly of spelling bee competitions in this once great country:

Pranav Mahadevan, a serious speller since second grade, had one final shot at the state spelling bee, where a win would finally give him his ticket to the national stage in Washington.

In anticipation of the Georgia Independent Schools Association spelling bee in Macon last month, the Dunwoody eighth-grader pored over word lists and studied word roots in Greek, Latin and French. But he was eliminated when the judges said he spelled the wrong word. He spelled “ivy”; the judges were looking for “ivied.”

Pranav, a student at Our Lady of the Assumption School in north Atlanta, said he misunderstood the pronouncer. He spelled the word he thought he heard, a word he repeated for the judges before he started spelling. His mother, Kalpana Mahadevan, appealed her son’s dismissal immediately, as is her right under the bee rules. But she said the judges refused to replay the tape to see whether the pronouncer had clearly articulated the word. Instead, they ruled that Pranav was out and proceeded with the contest.

This is personal. First they screw us by misrepresenting Hindus in California textbooks and now they go after our kind in Georgia. Is it Pranav’s fault that Georgians can’t properly articulate the “-ed” at the end of their words? My personal advice would be to set up a commission to look into this. Scientists could come and quantify the acoustics of the competition room and speech therapists could assess the so-called “pronouncer.” Both could later testify as expert witnesses in front of the congressional committee which overseas these matters.

All hope is not lost however. After Hurricane Katrina, the city of Houston demonstrated its limitless generosity by taking in the vast majority of Katrina victims. On a recent trip to Houston, Pranav’s mom learned that the city was also known for taking in those abused by the Spelling Bee System and the incompetent federal and state officials who are responsible for its breakdown:

In Georgia, few students pursue spelling as diligently as Pranav, who has broadcasts of past National Spelling Bees on tape and can rattle off the winning words for the past several years.

His mother networked among parents in Texas, where the Indian-American community is very active in spelling bees. They advised her to move to Texas, saying that Georgia didn’t have a reputation of taking spelling competition seriously.

Georg…ia hates brown people. Continue reading →

Marina Budhos reading today in Manhattan

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Author Marina Budhos tackles the post-9/11 immigration crackdown in her new young adult novel Ask Me No Questions (thanks, Pooja and SAJA). She’s reading today in Manhattan at 6:30pm (note corrected time). Here’s the blurb:

For fourteen-year-old Nadira and eighteen-year-old Aisha, these are the words that define their lives. Nadira and her family are illegal aliens, fleeing to the Canadian border – running from the country they thought would one day be their home. For years, they have lived on expired visas in New York City, hoping they can realize their dream of becoming legal citizens of the United States. But after 9/11, everything changes. Suddenly, being Muslim means being dangerous. A suspected terrorist. And when Nadira’s father is arrested and detained at the border, she and her sister, Aisha are sent back to Queens, and told to carry on, as if everything is the same.

But of course nothing is the same. Nadira and Aisha live in fear they’ll have to return to a Bangladesh they hardly know. Aisha, once the academic star, falls apart. Now it’s up to Nadira to find a way out.

Budhos previously wrote The Professor of Light, House of Waiting, and Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers:

Jhumpa Lahiri and Marina Budhos

Marina Budhos was born in Queens, New York, the child of an Indo-Guyanese father and a Jewish-American mother who met in the 1950s when her father worked for the Indian Consulate in Manhattan…

She was a Fulbright Scholar in India, during which she wrote about the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India for The Nation. She has also covered international news for Ms… [Link]

… Marina Budhos’s second novel, The Professor of Light, [is] a vivid account of a young American girl’s troubled relationship with her brilliant but disturbed Guyanese-Indian father.

Born and raised in New York City, Budhos is the great grand-daughter of indentured laborers who left India for Guyana about a hundred years ago… [Link]

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Waris X

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Movie candyman A. Lane has just revealed more info about Waris Singh Ahluwalia’s part in Spike Lee’s new film Inside Man. He reports in the New Yorker that Ahluwalia plays Vikram Walia, a Sikh hostage in a bank heist who’s disrespected by the cops coming to save him. It’s his second character named Vikram:

Magazine photo shoot: two hours

Sauntering around armor room in a cape: priceless

The more it sags as a thriller, the more it jabs and jangles as a study of racial abrasion. A hostage is released, and an armed cop shouts, “He’s an Arab!” The hostage replies, “I’m a Sikh,” and you can hear the weariness at the edges of his fear…

“Grand Illusion” offered the ennobling suggestion that national divisions were delusory, and that our common humanity can throw bridges across any social gulf. To which Lee would reply, Nice idea. Go tell it to the guy who just had his turban pulled off by the cops. [Link]

… the ethnic vaudeville is pure Spike…. in-your-face all the time: Inside Man resounds with stray assertions of irate identity like… “What the fuck–give me my turban!” The latter demand, delivered by a Sikh bank employee to the cops who are questioning him, readily segues into a diatribe against post-9-11 profiling, the onrushing complaint coming to an abrupt bada-boom when [Denzel] Washington’s partner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) dryly observes, “I bet you can get a cab, though.” [Link]

There are a couple of references to institutional racism and post-9/11 angst… [Link]

Imagine that, a caper flick which discards the cliché of only casting white or black actors:

Through the main protagonists and bank hostages, Lee presents a multi-racial panoramic view of New York at present. [Link]

It may seem like a predictable cliche, especially to the director’s detractors, that he so intently underlines the ethnicity of even the most minor characters; ‘What the fuck — give me my turban!’much is made of the rainbow brigade that constitutes the hostage group: the white woman who talks loudly on her cell phone; the young Sikh hostage who, when released, strenuously complains of being mistaken for an Arab; the glam Albanian sexpot who knows how to play her cards, and the young black hostage whose ultraviolent “Kill Dat N*” computer game gives pause even to Russell. [Link]

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Team North Korea, World Cop-Outs

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North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il has just made up a new reason why he’s building nukes instead of disarming: because of the recent India-U.S. nuclear energy deal.

‘I’m so lonely’

Last week, [North Korea] warned that it had the right to launch a pre-emptive strike… The spokesman also said it would be a “wise” step for the United States to cooperate on nuclear issues with North Korea in the same way it does with India… The accord was reached even though New Delhi has not signed the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. North Korea has withdrawn from the treaty and condemned the United States for giving India “preferential” treatment. [Link]

So he claims he’s going to continue the North Korea nuclear weapons program, begun over 13 years ago, because of a two-week-old treaty. Fabricating facts out of thin air to fit a pre-determined policy — where have I heard this before?

The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made. It went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq. [Link – former CIA senior analyst for the Middle East in Foreign Affairs]

And no, I’m not comparing Dubya with the dictator of an internationally isolated police state. As an American, Dubya would never condone torturing and locking up people without trial.

Related posts: How they learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb, The worst of ‘Times’

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