Monthly Archives: March 2006

87 Hours Until the DC Meetup!

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Yo Dad is coming!

Isn’t that the GREATEST picture? Want to know the absolute best thing about it? It’s true.

Are you ready for this jelly?

The much-adored and revered “Yo Dad” might make a cameo at the first-ever chocolate city SMeetup.

Wait! There’s more! The elusive “Yo Mom” might accompany him, too!

Go ahead. Take a moment to digest. I know I needed one.

According to highly placed, unnamed sources, the parent whose words inspire collective swooning on any thread he comments on will be at Amma’s in Georgetown this Saturday. NOW what’s your excuse for not coming? Even the legendary (six-hours?!) San Francisco events and Manhattan meets didn’t have THIS sort of star power. Surely you’ll be in attendance now, right? 🙂

After all, this will be our Abhi’s first meetup. Mind blowing, right? The father of this Mutiny will finally link himself publicly to this scandalous site; this brazen and ultra-rare excursion from the innermost sanctum of the North Dakota bunker shall concomitantly jeopardize his future chances for political office AND mark him as an unsuitable boy. Do you really want to miss that?

In addition to those headliners and legends, steadfast mutineers Kenyandesi, Msichana, CinnamonRani, Chai and the awe-inspiring Chick Pea from Hotlanta–who is making the rest of you look lame with her devotion to the cause, i.e. her willingness to travel– will be attending as well, according to our last call for RSVPs.

And you? Should we add you to the list?

WHERE: Amma’s Vegetarian Kitchen, 3291 M St. NW, Washington, DC 20007, 202-625-6625

WHEN: Saturday, 5:30pm (which should enable a 6pm start)

WHY: My fotolog is needing snaps, yaar. 😉

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Language Barriers

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According to Karsh Kale, the London born and New York raised producer/dj/musician, the title of his third studio release (and most recent album) entitled Broken English, was based on the concept of trying to

“create songs in English, but to give them a sentiment and a sense of universality, so it works in places where English is not their first language. But at the same time, you still understand the sentiment of the songs. That was the original idea of Broken English (link).”

I must admit, I was really looking forward to this third album. To this day Kale’s debut Realize continues to be one of my favorites, and I love its remixed incarnation Redesign. I was however slightly disappointed with Liberation, the follow-up to Realize. For me, Realize had set the bar so high that no follow-up could have topped it. Don’t get me wrong, Liberation was good, just not great. Perhaps it was Kale’s departure from the familiar drum and bass and dance vibe that I was used to, or maybe it was that I thought the cinematic feel of the album was a reach.

In any case, I approached Broken English anxiously, mainly because I had found many recent diasporic desi releases to be trite and mechanical. I was hoping Broken English would be different, and different it was. Wait, is that innovation and musicanship I hear? When I first started listening, I heard hints of Nitin Sawhney through the innovative and non-overtly desi touches in the production, vocals, and instrumentation. Yes the album has Bollywood and Bhangra, as well as the tablatronica that Kale is known for, but it also incorporates hip-hop and rock. All of which work surprisingly brilliant together. While overall, the album presents an eclectic and lush soundscape, Kale stayed true to his roots and kept a few tracks purely South Asian, including among others, the nicely paced “Drive,” and the beautiful duet “Some Things are O.K,” featuring vocals by Sabiha Khan and longtime Kale collaboratorVishal Vaid.

This album is clearly no East meets West hybrid, and there is no American curry or other Indian food adjectives available to describe the sound. It is what it is: purely American in every complex way that makes an American, an American. You get that sense immediately with the opening track, Manifest (click here for free official download): where MC Napoleon raps alongside Vaid’s vocal, while a dhol loop echoes in the background. This is followed by one of my favorite record’s on the album, “Dancing at Sunset,” featuring Todd Michaelsen’s English vocals alongside Carnatic strings and an eloquently placed tabla break and Hindi vocal. Continue reading →

Border Vigilantes

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The Minuteman Project (MMP) is a group of reportedly 6,500 volunteer citizens who are attempting to address and curb illegal immigration in the United States by patrolling the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders. The purpose of the group, in its own words, is:

to bring national awareness to the decades-long careless disregard of effective U.S. immigration law enforcement. It is a reminder to Americans that our nation was founded as a nation governed by the “rule of law,” not by the whims of mobs of ILLEGAL aliens who endlessly stream across U.S. borders…. Future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a harmonious “melting pot.” The result: political, economic and social mayhem. [Link]

Not surprisingly, the MPP has generated a signficant amount of controversy: it has been accused of being racist, ineffective, illegitimate, and of having ties to Neo-Nazis. Last year, legal observers from the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Arizona monitored the activities of the MMP volunteers, before the MMP left Arizona in April 2005. One concerned onlooker had this to say about the MMP’s work:

“It’s going to encourage a lot of negative implications for brown-looking people, if you want to call it that, racial profiling….” [Link]

To be sure, citizens can be an integral part of a wider law enforcement initiative. For example, community policing — which involves collaborative efforts between the police and members of the general public, and which demands compassion from the police towards the communities they serve — has shown encouraging signs of success, particularly in areas with high concentrations of minorities, such as Miami. However, the MPP is not a part of an official border patrol program; it is a self-appointed entity that acts in isolation and with an unfortunate view of diversity and multiculturalism. Moreover, there are fears from human rights organizations as to how the MMP actually carries out its patrolling efforts – through directly confronting migrants, apprehending them, or worse. Continue reading →

"The blacker the soul…"

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For the past week the darling of the media has been Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia:

President Bush welcomed Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to the White House on Tuesday, calling Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state “a pioneer.”

In January, first lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attended the inauguration of the 67-year-old Harvard-educated former finance minister. She inherits a war-ruined nation of 3 million with an 80 percent unemployment rate, no running water and no electricity. Despite its diamond and timber wealth, Liberia is among the world’s poorest; ranked 206th in per capita income out of 208 countries on a 2004 World Bank list.

Neither leader publicly commented on U.S. aid to Liberia or Sirleaf’s request for Nigeria to hand over exiled former President Charles Taylor, who is wanted on war crimes charges. Taylor has been indicted by a U.N. tribunal on charges of committing crimes against humanity by aiding and directing a Sierra Leone rebel movement and trading guns and gems with insurgents infamous for chopping off the lips, ears and limbs of civilian victims. [Link]

The shadow of Charles Taylor will dominate Liberian politics for the forseeable future. Taylor is one of the main reasons why I have vowed never to purchase a worthless “rock” for anyone.

After the official end of the civil war in 1996, Taylor became Liberia’s president on August 2, 1997, following a landslide victory in July, in which he took 75% of the vote. The election was judged free and fair by observers, although Taylor’s victory has been partially attributed to the belief that he would resume the war if he lost, and therefore many people may have voted for him simply to preserve peace. For example, his campaign song included the words “he killed my ma, he killed my pa, I’ll vote for him…”

In June 2003, a United Nations justice tribunal issued a warrant for Taylor’s arrest, charging him with war crimes. The UN asserts that Taylor created and backed the RUF rebels in Sierra Leone, which is accused of a range of atrocities, including the use of child soldiers. The prosecutor also said Taylor’s administration had harbored members of Al-Qaeda sought in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania… [Link]

So that brings us to the negotiations which seek to extradite the scum bag from Nigeria. Many people are afraid that bringing him to justice will cause bloodshed by polarizing the fragile country once again. Some of the negotiations on Taylor’s behalf are being conducted by an American. He is an Indian American evangelical preacher to be precise: Kilari Anand Paul. Continue reading →

A (rented) womb of one’s own

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Desi women have now joined desi men in the business of assisted fertility. When you combine Indian medical prowess with lots of poor people you get pharmaceutical testing, organ sales, and now a thriving business in surrogate motherhood [Thanks to wgiia for alerting me to this story]. This sector is now worth roughly a half a billion dollars a year and growing rapidly.

Daksha, a shy Gujarati woman in her early 30s, wants a child – but not for herself. The baby is for the “Britishers”, the couple seated in the lobby of the Indian fertility clinic. It is the first time that the British Asian couple, Ajay and Saroj Shah, from Leicester, have met Daksha. The 31-year-old is “loaning” her womb to them for 150,000 rupees (£2,000) and is candid about needing the money. Her shop job pays only 2,000 rupees a month. [Link]

Daksha is getting paid six years of salary for this service, and the desi British couple involved have gotten away cheaply (why am I not surprised?). Another story gives a price almost twice as high for a Scandanavian couple:

Mehta is, in fact, renting her womb out to the couple for a cool Rs 4 lakh to Rs 5 lakh. [Link]

Like everything else in India, however, local prices are far cheaper than prices in the west:

… it costs £100-300 to advertise for a surrogate mother in India versus the £1,000 charged by a British daily. Not surprisingly, an advertisement for a surrogate mother has been appearing in Indian newspapers and magazines in a dozen cities once a week for a couple of months [Link]

[One] couple … will be spending nearly Rs 10 lakh on the entire process, far less than the Rs 26 lakh to Rs 35 lakh they would have had to fork out at an in vitro fertilisation (IVF) clinic in California, which they had considered earlier. [Link] … They opted for the Indian clinics to save 2.5m rupees (£31,000). [Link]

At about £3,000 in Britain, an IVF cycle costs five times what you might pay in India. In addition, in Britain, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has outlawed payments, but a surrogate can be reimbursed for a maximum of £10,000 to cover expenses; the payments often fall between £4,000 and £10,000. [Link]

In the US, a single IVF cycle is six to eight times more expensive than in India, where it comes for Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh — or half of what it costs in the UK. [I realize that these figures are inconsistent] The refinement of such techniques and their low cost is what is spawning the boom in surrogate motherhood. And it helps that the amount earned for bearing a child for somebody else can be as high as a middle-class office-goer’s salary for two years or so. [Link]

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The Martyrdom of Abdul Rahman (slightly updated)

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Apparently, THIS is why my sister’s friends are putting their lives on the line in Afghanistan: The Martyrdom of Saint Stephen

An Afghan man is being tried in a court in the capital, Kabul, for converting from Islam to Christianity.
Abdul Rahman is charged with rejecting Islam and could face the death sentence under Sharia law unless he recants.

Rahman, who was carrying a bible last month when he was arrested and charged with dissing Islam, has a backstory which is perfect for a Christian martyr, replete with persecution from the most intimate levels:

He converted 16 years ago as an aid worker helping refugees in Pakistan. His estranged family denounced him in a custody dispute over his two children.

Four years after the Taleban was ousted, conservative clerics are still in control of Afghanistan’s judiciary, stymieing Hamid Karzai’s reform-minded government, which would obviously prefer a secular legal branch. Afghanistan’s Sharia-based constitution enables this mess, creating a clusterfuck where Karzai can’t intervene in this case of conservatives v. reformists.

Trial Judge Ansarullah Mawlazezadeh benevolently states:

“We will invite him again because the religion of Islam is one of tolerance. We will ask him if he has changed his mind. If so we will forgive him,”

…and if not, they will kill him.

How tolerant of them. Shame on such narrow-minded hypocrites. Shame on those whose narrow-minded hypocrisy defiles a religion which means “peace”.

It turns out that they don’t just hate Christians (whew! THAT’S a relief):

Several journalists have been prosecuted under blasphemy laws in post-Taleban Afghanistan.
The editor of a women’s rights magazine was convicted of insulting Islam and sentenced to death last year – but was later released after an apology and heavy international pressure.

I don’t want to be the president of Afghanistan right now. Constitutionally castrated, he can’t do a thing as Sharia-mad clerics rush to judge and potentially execute a man whose only crime was choosing a different (and still Abrahamic!) faith. Continue reading →

IndianDonating.com

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This NYT story about single women attempting artificial insemination explains what happens when a 38-year-old, blond, female advertising exec starts browsing sperm donor profiles. Yup, one of them turns out to be desi:

She loves dandy lions

As I sat across her desk, she pulled up the donors’ descriptions on her computer. One was Indian: “He’s got black straight hair,” she told me, “brown eyes, he’s six feet but he only weighs 150. Which is good. If I have a girl, she wants to be skinny, and if she can eat what she wants, that’s perfect. You don’t have to get in fights about food.” The Indian donor’s complexion was described as “medium/dark,” and he had proven fertility. He had a master’s degree in business. He was bilingual, Hindu, single and liked traveling and music. His family-health history looked good. [Link]

I can see their first meeting now. He comes out of the kitchen in a salwar kameez with a dupatta over his head, tea tray in hand, eyes downcast and shy. She ticks ‘wheatish complexion’ on her clipboard and says, ‘Beta, please walk around the room’ to make sure he’s not lame. She opens his mouth and checks his molars, hocks and withers.

Sure, everything looks good on paper now, but what happens 18 years down the road? They need to put out a public health warning:

YOUR TALL, STUDLY HADESI CHILD
MAY GROW UP ADDICTED TO
BADMINTON, PAAN AND TEEN PATTI

This story shouldn’t surprise anyone though. With the conservative public morés of traditional desi culture, hundreds of millions of desi men happily spill surplus gametes outside the regular channels. But this chap was the only one enterprising enough to get paid for it.

Is he desi? Oh, indubitably.

Continue reading →

Desi athletes take the gold

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Desi athletes have picked up a series of gold medals in the 2006 Commonwealth games in Melbourne. I know it’s not the Olympics, but the sight of a gold medal hanging around any brown neck is rare enough that it is worth remarking on. India is ranked third of all countries (after Australia and the UK England), with 12 gold medals, while Pakistan and Sri Lanka each have one. [By comparison, Australia, the host, has 42 gold medals and the UK England has 18]

Invoking every Goddess before serving sure slowed things down

These recent victories wont give brown people a reputation for being jocks though. At least five of India’s gold medals are from air rifle events. While I’m sure this requires skill, I can’t imagine that it takes either stamina or strength. The Indian women’s table tennis team also won a gold, but only with divine intervention:

In table-tennis, India’s women’s team won a closely fought match against Canada, winning 3-2. “I prayed to the Goddesses to please give me strength to perform well for myself and India,” India’s Mouma Das is quoted as saying by AFP news agency. “I felt in my heart they heard” [Link]

This isn’t even badminton fer cryin’ out loud, let alone “real” tennis. How much pride am I supposed to take in the fact that it took all the Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon to win a table tennis competition without any Chinese athletes! And air rifle and table tennis account for at least half of the Indian gold medals.

The most macho gold medal was won by the Pakistanis who set a new Commonwealth record in weightlifting:

Pakistan picked up its first gold medal of the Games with a win for Shuja-ud-din Malik in the men’s 85kg weightlifting event. Malik’s combined 343kg in the clean-and-jerk, including a new Commonwealth record of 193kg, placed him ahead of Cameroon’s Brice Batchaya. [Link]

I’ve got my fingers crossed, hoping that desi athletes can redeem themselves by doing well in some more strenuous sport, like Netball or Lawn Bowling. During the last Commonwealth Games, the Indians won 30 gold medals. Would it be too much to ask if half of India’s gold medals this time were in sports that desi mothers would disapprove of?

UPDATE: Wgiia, ms and Soooraj remind me that India’s first gold medal was earned by female weight lifter Kunjarani Devi and that two of India’s 12 medals are in women’s weightlifting.

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Sniff ’n scratch

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A new breed of NYC subway card vending machines which can sniff trace amounts of explosives on customers’ hands is about to be tested in Baltimore.

K9 agent

Automatically scanning all subway riders is definitely the way to go, but IMO this is the wrong technical approach:

Two companies have teamed up to develop a machine that can detect whether the straphanger who just touched the start button or screen has recently handled explosives. Alerts – including a digital image of the person at the machine and the type of substance detected – can be quickly transmitted to law enforcement officials, company officials said. The device can be programmed to lock turnstiles at the station… A pilot project to test its effectiveness in a mass transit system is expected to be launched in Baltimore in the coming weeks. [Link]

The companies involved may be going this way because there are fewer card vending machines than subway turnstiles, and there’s more space inside each one to cram in sniffers. But this method so indirect, it’s like looking for a lost quarter under a streetlight instead of where you actually dropped it.

First, a terrorist smart enough to build a bomb is probably smart enough to buy a subway card from any newsstand or convenience store. Second, trace sniffing seems like it could be easily circumvented by using gloves and changing clothes (pure conjecture, this is not my field). Third, there’s a risk of false alarms from people who work with explosives-like substances, such as gardeners who use fertilizer, and those who work with explosives as part of their jobs, such as the mole-men currently digging new water tunnels in NYC.

NYC’s bag check security theater seem to have faded away after the post-7/7 hysteria, but subway cities still need to scan for actual bombs, not indirect conjectures of WMD-related program activities. Entrances and turnstiles are the right places to put these scanners, not easily-bypassed vending machines. And profiling is just as useless — based on actual empirical evidence in NYC, we’d be targeting white male software developers and Latino ex-cops:

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Post your events here

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Since the News tab turned out so well, here’s a new Events tab for your pleasure (thanks, Abhi). Readings, plays, premieres, your own mini-meetups — feel free to post away.

Unlike the rest of the blog, events are sorted forward by time. That means upcoming events are shown first so you can see what’s happening in the next couple of days. Click the address to get a map to the event. Past events expire automatically.

The subscription feed will be up in the next few days.

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