Monthly Archives: April 2006

Sepia Destiny

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Ever since I got my nano, I have been obsessed with downloading podcasts. Since there isn’t a Sepia Mutiny podcast for me to download (ahem) I do the next best thing and listen to a Desi Dilemma, a podcast by a woman named Smitha Radhakrishnan. This week’s series on ‘Desi Love’ perked my ear up- seeing as how the search for a ‘suitable mate’ is always at the forefront topic for most mutineers (or so it seems).

“There was a clear message from the Indian community about dating, that it was somehow inextricably linked with the most dangerous, scary thing that could befall an ABCD kid; an identity crisis.”

As has been mentioned before on this blog, as an ABCD youth one often had to deal with the projection by your peers that the only people you were expected to date is that one other desi in the school, even though you had nothing in common with them. Forget the fact that you weren’t allowed to date; if you had been, there was no one there for you to date, in the often confusing bi-cultural high school years. For me, this reminds me of senior prom. And prom reminds me of how my mother wouldn’t let me go to prom unless I went with my gay guy friend because only then would she know nothing would happen to me on prom night. How’s that for bi-cultural confusion?

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One ring to rule them all

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French feminists have begun agitating to ditch the title of ‘Mademoiselle’ (Miss) and call all women ‘Madame.’ A French organization called Les Chiennes de Garde (the Guard Dog Bitches) wrote:

“The option Madame/Mademoiselle means that a woman has to give an indication about her availability, in particular her sexual availability. A letterbox is not meant to be a dating agency…” [Link]

It’s similar to the shift to Ms. in the U.S.:

The use of Ms. as a title was conceived by Sheila Michaels in 1961… Michaels, who was illegitimate, and not adopted by her stepfather, had long grappled with finding a title which reflected her situation: not being owned by a father and not wishing to be owned by a husband… the title is now standard, especially in business — and where one may not know or find relevant the marital status of the woman so addressed. [Link]

One feminist has a novel reason for the shift:

Emmanuele Peyret, wrote in the newspaper Libération that “the insidious passage from Mademoiselle to Madame is so painful that we may as well begin by being called Madame straight away, in the cradle”. [Link]

I think that’s a fine idea. As you hold a naked, wailing baby upside down and give her the welcome whack, you can say, ‘Pardonnez-moi, madame.’ It’s the polite thing to do.

And why stop there? It is absolutely true that women bear the burden of being marked as property. In fact, the full burkha of devout Muslims angles for complete sexual control, but almost every culture has milder restraints: the bindi, the sindoor, the wedding ring.

I’m of a breed which dislikes wearing things on the skin. We live streamlined, unornamented and unscented. It’s not that I object to status markers, especially one so hard fought-for by women as the reciprocal, male wedding ring. It’s just that wearing rings bugs me.

But there are simple alternatives. By a happy coincidence, the Hindu color of auspiciousness is also the color of traffic lights; the red bindi is also the signal for Stop, She’s Taken. So give me a green bindi to signal Single. Or for my lapel, the slide latch from an airplane loo, set to Available.

Forget Ms., forget Madame, forget cell phone dating. To avoid crossed wires, all you need is one good sticker.

Related posts: The Gender Gap

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Giving you the Willies

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Norah Jones just released a new album with her country music band, the Little Willies (listen here). I suspected the love that dare not speak its name from her country-inflected second album, Feels Like Home.

In the late-night hours, the smoky-voiced jazz singer and her friends would go out to one of [New York’s] intimate music clubs and – in front of an audience no less – get on stage with her friends to belt out … country tunes… Her band – known as the Little Willies – has released its first [self-titled] album, filled with rollicking covers of songs by the likes of Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Hank Williams Jr., plus a few penned by the Little Willies’ own members…

Their label name, Milking B., reminds me of my favorite milk brand name in Bombay, Milkerji:

The band realized they were doing more than just fooling around when they decided to do an extended gig at the Living Room, the small music space and bar that would become their base when they performed in New York… Alexander and Jones, who are also a couple, were building a home studio and wanted to record something to test it out… The whole album was recorded in less than two days and released on their imprint label, Milking B. [Link]

Home for Jones means Texas and country:

For Jones, a Texas native with a longtime love for jazz, playing with the band helped her realize her own roots, back to the days when her grandmother would play the old-time country songs. [Link]

But one could also imagine an alternate universe where home meant releasing an album of rockin’ Bengali folk music

Since nobody’s said it yet, I’ll give the obvious answer to Jones’ signature plaint:

Q: ‘I feel as empty as a drum / Don’t know why I didn’t come’
A: Little Willies

Indeed, Jones is no prude.

Related posts: Norah and Dolly’s double-E’s, Norahhh!: Jones’ big fat Greek wedding

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48 Hours Till the Los Angeles Meetup!

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The down side – Your taxes are due on April 15th.

John Abraham wants you to come to the L.A. Sepia Mutiny Meetup.

The up side – You get to drown your tax sorrows with fellow mutineers at the first ever Los Angeles Sepia Mutiny Meetup!

How excited are we?!?

Date: April 15, 2006 THIS Saturday

Time: 5:30 pm

NEW Place: Tribal Café, 1651 W. Temple St., #A, LOS ANGELES

The SM Meetup Makin’ Machine has been working over time to make sure this Meetup is one not to be forgotten. We will have appearances by yours truly, Abhi, Payal, prateek(?), Ami +2, Rahul, Janani, Biggie Mac, Deepa +1…(anyone I’m missing?)

To answer Biggie Mac, I’ll be the one with the metal stud in my chin, but I’m pretty sure a mob of mutineers at Tribal will be hard to miss.

In an attempt to entice you further to come out for this not to be missed event, celebrity SM Blogger Abhi has offered to give every mutineer that walks through the door a private lesson on the secret Sepia Mutiny handshake which is known only by those who have entered the ND bunkers! How can you not come to now?

To further entice you, there’s a picture of John Abraham. So please come!

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Americans love their Indian reservations

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A new Indian proposal would reserve half the seats of India’s city on a hill, the exalted halls of IIT, for historically oppressed castes.

Would you riot for Samuel L. Jackson, foo’?

The Mandal II proposal is so self-evidently idiotic, so clearly death to the golden goose, that the blogosphere has been a-sputter with indignation. Various wags have suggested the same quota be applied to seats held by members of Parliament. As with the Rajkumar riots which have shut down the Emerald City of Bangalore (photos), many have simply rolled their eyes: ‘Oh darling, yeh hai India.’

But it’s not just India. The NYT reports that not only is the misuse of quotas politically appealing in America, it’s so appealing that white students are using DNA tests turning up two to three percent black or Native American ancestry to claim minority status in college admissions. It’s a microcosm of the American national character, both high tech and shameless

Prospective employees with white skin are using the tests to apply as minority candidates, while some with black skin are citing their European ancestry in claiming inheritance rights… Americans of every shade are staking a DNA claim to Indian scholarships, health services and casino money… “It’s about access to money and power…”

“If someone appears to be white and then finds out they are not, they haven’t experienced the kinds of things that affirmative action is supposed to remedy…” Ashley Klett’s younger sister marked the “Asian” box on her college applications this year, after the elder Ms. Klett, 20, took a DNA test that said she was 2 percent East Asian and 98 percent European… she did get into the college of her choice. “And they gave her a scholarship…” [Link]

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South Asian "Coyotes" busted

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A news story out late Wednesday combines themes from two of the posts that have gotten a flurry of comments this week: the immigration debate and South Asians near Vancouver. Canadian authorities and the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Seattle, made a joint announcement that they are indicting 14 U.S. and Canadian men for running a human trafficing ring which tried to smuggle South Asian nationals into the U.S.:

U.S. and Canadian authorities announced Wednesday that they have broken up a human smuggling ring suspected of illegally shepherding dozens of Indian and Pakistani nationals into Washington state from British Columbia.

To date, a federal grand jury in Seattle has indicted 14 U.S. and Canadian men for their roles in the alleged scheme. Twelve had been arrested as of Wednesday.

Leigh Winchell, special agent in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Seattle, said investigators on both sides of the border have worked closely for more than a year, apprehending roughly 50 people who had paid as much as $35,000 apiece to be smuggled into the United States. They were given fake U.S. Passports and were expected to fan out across the United States… [Link]

I can bet you that the members of Congress who advocate tougher border security only (without addressing the other issues) are going to have a field day with this. Too bad it is on the less politically convenient border. It becomes harder to advocate building a 700 mile wall on the border with Mexico under the guise of protecting against terrorism, when the foreign nationals you are more worried about (Pakistanis in this case) are caught attempting to come in through Canada (where they have a larger support network). The CBS article linked above has a list of the indicted. They include a few “kids” from Surrey. The BBC has a few more details:

Canadian police described South Asian citizens being flown into Toronto on false passports and then transported to Vancouver where they were hidden in suburban homes.

Then, the police say, the ring chose deserted locations along the border and shuttled the illegal migrants into the US.

Court documents say people paid the smugglers between $20,000 – $35,000 for each for the trip. [Link]

CNN was careful to note the following:

Authorities have found no connection to terrorism, but they said the arrests raise concerns about the vulnerability of the U.S.-Canadian border. [Link]
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It’s Not Just a Better Seat

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The Onion does it again…

Air India Now Offers Business Caste Seating

April 12, 2006 | Issue 42•15

MUMBAI–Air India, the subcontinent’s largest airline, announced it will offer upgraded Business Caste seating on all flights starting in July. “More legroom, wider seats–and no need to associate with the manual laborers,” a spokesman for the airline said Tuesday. “Our business travelers must have lived good past lives to deserve this. (link)

Something makes me believe that the fine folks over at The Onion may have actually flown an Air India flight while researching this story.

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Baby, Baby…

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In the realm of health policy, the low birth weight of babies is used as a primary measure in infant health as well as welfare in economic research.

Low birthweight affects about one in every 13 babies born each year in the United States. It is a factor in 65 percent of infant deaths. [link]
[R]esearch has found that [low birth weight] infants tend to have lower educational attainment, poorer self-reported health status, and reduced employment and earnings as adults, relative to their normal weight counterparts…[B]irth weight has been used to evaluate the effectiveness of social policy. Research on the benefits of largescale social programs–including welfare and health insurance for the poor–typically use birth weight as the primary indicator of infant welfare. [link]

I would like to point out at this moment that I was a healthy 9 pound baby when I was born, well above low birth weight levels, thank you very much. Unfortunately when the time comes for me to have a baby, as a ‘U.S.-born Asian Indian woman’, I run a high risk of having a low birth weight infant, according to recent research coming out of Stanford.

U.S.-born Asian-Indian women are more likely than their Mexican-American peers to deliver low birth weight infants, despite having fewer risk factors, say researchers at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and Stanford’s School of Medicine. The finding confirms previous research that showed a similar pattern in more recent immigrants, and suggests that physicians should consider their patients’ ethnic backgrounds when planning their care…They found that Asian-Indian women were more than twice as likely to have low birth weight infants as were white women. These infants weigh 2,500 grams (about 5.5 pounds) or less at birth, either because they grew poorly in the womb or were born prematurely.[link]

These results are important in the realm of South Asian American health policy and are significant, at least should be significant, as to how prenatal care for desi women are implemented. As a desi woman, it is important to be informed of this issue and as a policy maker, it has inherent long term effect in our community.

“You might ask, ‘What’s so bad about being small?'” said Madan, who points out that the growth curves used for this and other similar studies are based on white infants. “Is this just normal for Asian Indians? But we’re concerned because we know that abnormally small babies run a higher risk of fetal distress and often require more intensive medical care and longer hospital stays after birth.”

In addition, unusually small babies are known to be at higher risk for a variety of medical problems in adulthood, including diabetes, hypertension and an increased risk of heart disease – conditions that some studies have reported to be higher in Asian Indians. [link]

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Sounds like a protest to me

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Yesterday Taz brought you an account of desis representing at the immigration protests here on the West Coast. SM tipster “Mann” let’s us know about some desi representation on the East Coast in the form of some “rebel music.” The band Outernational was playing a protest in NYC. Sonny Suchdev (pictured right) plays the trumpet, vocals, dhol, and bongos for Outernational. I get the impression that conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wasn’t feelin’ the t-shirt that Sonny wore to the protest. According to her sources they “…provided music, including a song dedicated to the Muslims who rioted in France last year called ‘Riviera Uproar’.” Here is a clip which appears to be recorded from Monday’s concert. Alternet.org has a profile of the band who sat down to be interviewed by Naeem Mohaiemen in March:

Suchdev wearing a shirt on Monday that reads: “America is scary”

I’ve been following the band Outernational — with their fearless melange of punk, rap, ska, bhangra and afrobeat — since 2003. While still not a household name, the group began to make waves at 2004’s Republican National Convention protests in New York. That’s where they played (at the “Axis of Justice” concert organized by Tom Morello, formerly of Rage Against the Machine) to a large crowd of pissed-off activists, many of them Critical Mass bike riders who had just watched the NYPD target and arrest scores of their own (the Bloomberg administration claimed that “anarchists” had infiltrated the group bike ride). The repercussions of that day’s mass arrests and police mistreatment continue to reverberate in Outernational’s NYC home base.

Even before Outernational’s breakout performance at the RNC protests, they had fans — like me — regularly attending their shows for a political floor-stomping fix. In 2000, as the New York Times pondered the possible death of “protest music”, older anti-establishment voices like Consolidated, Public Enemy, Fugazi, and Negativland were dimming, and fans needed something new. Into the gap stepped Outernational, which came together in late 2003 with a heady mix of radical politics and furious beats. [Link]

Sonny describes how he got started with the band:

I had been an activist since I was a teenager and had been playing the trumpet since I was nine, but I had never found the right group of people to combine music and politics in a band. One day that fall, I was at dinner with some friends after a meeting (about post-9/11 detentions of immigrants), and Jesse [the bassist] was also there. He commented on the Skatalites T-shirt I was wearing, and we of course started talking about music. He told me about his friend Miles [vocals, lyrics] and how they were getting together and jamming with different people in the basement. I asked him what kind of music they were into, and he replied, “We’re on an outernationalist rebel music tip.” I had a good feeling about this. [Link]

Did anyone see them at the protest on Monday? The band’s website has both music and video clips you can check out, as does their MySpace page.

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