Monthly Archives: April 2006

Whoever You Are, You’re Not Alone.

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9pm. Café Mishka’s on 2nd street, Davis, CA . 1995.

One week in to the fall quarter of my senior year and I’m already stressed. I want to finish the Poli-sci incomplete which hangs over my head, stealing peace of mind and calm. This requires writing a 15-page paper on feminism, abortion and single-issue voters. I’ve made some progress, but much remains to be done and since Shields Library is either social central or a morgue, I can’t get it done there. So I have come to the newest and brightest spot in the tiny constellation of “third-places” which dot Davis ‘ downtown area. Mishka’s is just quiet enough, especially on a Friday night, and it also has excellent food. I order a sandwich, the name of which escapes me over a decade later. It has pesto and roasted red peppers, a detail I will never forget, because of what happens later on that night.

I’m halfway through my dinner and it’s 8:30pm. My cell phone rings and I answer, filled with trepidation. My father’s voice barks profanely over the line, “Where the HELL are you? What kind of life do you think you have? One where you can go as you please, party, take drugs? What have I told you about this world, kunju? It is a dangerous place and if you are not careful, you will end up abducted, raped and murdered somewhere and I will have to identify your body and then I will kill myself and then your sister will be without sibling or father. All because you want to PARTY.”

Sigh.

“Daddy, I’m actually-“

“What? You’re actually WHAT? You’re about to lie to me, I know you better than you know yourself. Save your BS for someone else, edi.”

“I’m not lying, I’m studying. I have a huge paper due-

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Root canals sucked even worse back then

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Via our newsline we see that Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature has a paper out which indicates that dentistry may be one of the world’s oldest professions. The paper, which has an Italian as the lead author, is titled Early Neolithic Tradition of Dentistry (paid subscription required). Now when we are old uncles/aunties we can brag to our children that South Asians invented denistry also.

Proving prehistoric man’s ingenuity and ability to withstand and inflict excruciating pain, researchers have found that dental drilling dates back 9,000 years.

Primitive dentists drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy patients between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday’s journal Nature reports. Researchers carbon-dated at least nine skulls with 11 drill holes found in a Pakistan graveyard.

That means dentistry is at least 4,000 years older than first thought — and far older than the useful invention of anesthesia.

This was no mere tooth tinkering. The drilled teeth found in the graveyard were hard-to-reach molars. And in at least one instance, the ancient dentist managed to drill a hole in the inside back end of a tooth, boring out toward the front of the mouth. [Link]

My whole life I had looked down on people with multiple cavities because I had never had one. I usually snubbed these “enamelly challenged” because I saw them as being weak and unable to resist candy. I got my just desserts though. Last year I got my first (and I swear it will be my last) cavity. By the time the doctor was done she had pulled two of my innocent teeth just to get to the offending tooth which she then reconstructed with a crown. My wisdom teeth surgery was even worse (warning: NSDL). Apparently they were like upside down. I can’t even begin to imagine how people were able to withstand the pain in the Neolithic.

The site of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan lies along the principal route connecting Afghanistan to the Indus valley. After intermittent occupations by hunter-gatherers, Mehrgarh’s subsistence economy shifted to the cultivation of barley and wheat, cotton domestication and cattle breeding. Diachronic archaeological evidence records an increasingly rich cultural life, with technological sophistication based on diverse raw materials. Excavation of the Neolithic cemetery known as MR3 yielded more than 300 graves created over a 1,500-year time span…

Whatever the purpose, tooth drilling on individuals buried at MR3 continued for about 1,500 years, indicating that dental manipulation was a persistent custom. After 6,500 yr BP, the practice must have ceased, as there is no evidence of tooth drilling from the subsequent MR2 Chalcolithic cemetery, despite the continuation of poor dental health. [Link]

Teeth are the greatest find in any paleontological/archeological expedition. Measuring istope ratios can even tell you what the people ate. I keep two of my old teeth on my desk at home. This is just in case my body is lost during some adventure and someone wants to learn about my lifestyle when I was still alive.

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That’s So Punk Rock

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Punk music and the subsequent punk movement is deeply rooted in fighting for the rebel cause and the fight against social injustices. I’m not talking the pop-angst of Blink 182 -type bands that are splayed across MTV, but the bands at the root of the brit-punk rock uprisings in the mid-70s as well as the emergence of the political hardcore punk rock scene in DC in the 80s. The lyrics are intertwined with anti-injustice words such as, “…and now I can’t sleep from years of apathy, all because I read a little Noam Chomsky” (NOFX), or with “…all the power’s in the hands, of people rich enough to buy it,” (The Clash).

I’ve been going to punk shows for the past 10 years, early on as a rebellious punk teen and more recently, clipboards in hand registering youth voters at the show, with non-profit groups like Music for America or SAAVY. Most often though at these punk shows, I was one of a handful of desi kids.

Unfortunately being a desi punk has its consequences…

Harraj Mann, 23, asked a taxi driver to play The Clash’s London Calling through the vehicle’s stereo. But the cabbie rang police after he heard the song which includes the line: “War is declared and battle come down.” A spokeswoman also said that it was not just the music Mr Mann requested, but the “overall impression” he gave that aroused the taxi driver’s suspicion. [link]

The irony is he was listening to The Clash, a brit-punk band of the 1970s known for their anti-racism sentiments as well as Led Zepplin’s “Immigrant Song.” Even more ironic is that it was the taxi-wallah that turned this guy in, though no mention of the ethnicity of said cab driver.

Police said Mr Mann, from Hartlepool, was released without charge after his arrest on board a Bmi plane at Durham Tees Valley Airport. Durham Police said a security check revealed he did not pose a threat.

He told BBC Radio Five Live: “I said to staff you’ve taken me off my flight due to my taste in music, in a more colourful way…I mean where does it stop? What if I was wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, what if I was wearing odd socks, you know…I mean obviously the political climate these days is like walking on egg shells, but I mean there’s caution and then there’s taking it to the point where it’s absurd and ludicrous.”

Here, here, punk desi youth! “Look at those crazy kids, with their wild hair, and loud music,” is the most oft heard gripe from elder people but additionally, we have to deal with the profiling that comes with being desi as well. It’s a double whammy. Obviously, in light of the london bombings last year, I’m sure things must be harder for the day to day lives of desi youth across the pond. But would a terrorist really play The Clash in a taxi on the way to the airport? Common sense says no. Should I now start having to worry that today I wore a shirt that says, “Major Labels Lie” and was listening to Dead Prez in my stickered car? Well, maybe they have reason to worry just a little bit there… All I gotta say is, stay strong brother, and punk on.

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Possible hate crime on Baylor campus

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My friend Anji M. tips me off to a possible hate crime on the Baylor campus down in Texas. Many of the news reports seem to highlight (sometimes multiple times in the same article) that the senior was involved with Muslim-Christian dialog on campus.

A Muslim Baylor University senior of South Asian heritage who was active in Muslim-Christian relations was attacked on the school’s campus Saturday night, suffering multiple injuries.

Chief Jim Doak of the Baylor Department of Public Safety confirmed that police were alerted about the attack and that the incident is being investigated, but he refused to release further details. Neither Doak nor a university spokeswoman could immediately say whether the alleged attack will be investigated as a hate crime.

The Baylor DPS web site indicated that the attack occurred near Draper Hall between 8:45 and 9 p.m.

Rabiah Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said the victim called them Monday and said a man, thought to be in his 30s, grabbed her hijab, an Islamic head scarf, and threw the woman to the ground. As he did, the attacker allegedly yelled anti-Muslim and ethnic slurs at the woman including “Arabian (expletive)” and “(expletive) Muslims.”

When the woman screamed, her attacker reportedly slapped her and kicked her multiple times in the ribs, according to Ahmed. An emergency room examination found bruises and a dislocated shoulder, Ahmed said.

The victim, who was active in Muslim-Christian relations on the Baylor campus, went to her family home in Oklahoma after the attack. Ahmed said she was told the victim would stay home for about a week. [Link]

Here is another account with additional details. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) got in touch with the FBI soon after word of the incident surfaced. The FBI agreed to send someone down:

“We have had an FBI representative on campus with us throughout the day today and will continue to work with the agency as this process goes forward,” Doak said.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic relations called on the FBI Tuesday to probe the attack on the coed as a hate crime. [Link]

We’ll try to keep readers updated when additional details emerge.

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The politics of sacrifice

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Merchants in Maharashtra have begun a hunger strike to eliminate local taxes. Unlike poor farmers consuming pesticide or distraught students immolating themselves, this involves what seems to be relatively well-off businesspeople lobbying for lower taxes. Whatever happened to the traditional method, buying a politician?

[A Maharashtra trade association] has called for a hunger strike on April three protesting against the levy of octroi… [Link]

Similarly, Sonia Gandhi’s renunciation theater should have her winning re-election shortly:

Sonia Gandhi, the leader of India’s governing coalition, stepped down Thursday as a member of Parliament… a New Delhi-based political analyst… compared Thursday’s announcement to Gandhi’s decision in 2004 to refuse the prime minister’s job, which sent her popularity soaring as many people saw it as a rare act of renunciation in Indian politics. [Link]

Sonia Gandhi and her supporters have shown themselves to be by far the wiliest folks in Indian politics. I don’t believe this “sacrifice” nonsense, but I have to doff my hat at the tactical brilliance of this decision… [Gandhi] is brilliant at impression management and knows the value of a “moral high ground” in as emotional an electorate as [India’s]. [Link]

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One Night In Paris. In West Bengal.

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Maybe it’s because I live in Los Angeles. But I’ll be the first to admit it. I love celebrity gossip. Imagine my surprise when I heard this report on the news this morning.

Mother Teresa. Totally see the resemblance.

Paris Hilton is on the short-list to play beatified nun Mother Teresa in an upcoming bipoic of the late Nobel Peace Prize winner. Film director T. Rajeevnath said his idea to cast the 25-year-old celebutante after a computer-generated image showed a close facial match between “The Simple Life” simpleton and the Albanian-born holy woman. “(Hilton’s) features resemble Mother Teresa’s,” Rajeevnath said. [link]

Waaaaait a second. Didn’t we just play the ‘who’s famous face matches mine’ game using a computer-generated image facial matching website here on Sepia Mutiny only a few months back?

I’ll just let you know that I ended up at a verrry interesting website, which scanned a picture I uploaded before telling me which celebrity in its database I resembled. See whom YOU don’t look like by going to MyHeritage.com y’self. [link]

I mean, Rajeevnath is Indian. Maybe he reads Sepia Mutiny and maybe, just maybe, that is what compelled him to pick Paris Hilton. That, and this:

But it was when the director read an article in which Hilton said she had turned down the chance to pose nude for Playboy maggie that he believed he had found the woman to emulate Mother Teresa’s good works. Shooting in several countries, including West Bengal will begin early next year.

Proceeds from the film will benefit the Missionaries of Charity.

Missionaries. Paris Hilton. Hmm… I wonder how familiar she is with that line of work…

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Worth a lick?

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Indian Americans have been trying for a long time to get the U.S. Postal Service to issue a Diwali stamp. The Aussies on the other hand have gone the extra kilometer. They have featured Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan on one of their postage stamps. See for yourself:

Saif Ali Khan who has danced his way to Australian history with his performance in Commonwealth Games. He became the first Indian to feature on a postage stamp published in Australia.

50-cent stamp has Saif among those released on March 27. It shows him on stage in a green kurti with other dancers. Rani Mukherjee and Aishwarya Rai had no such luck who were with Saif from Bollywood. [Link]
I can’t help but find this funny. Indians didn’t really represent at the Olympics, but seemed to do okay at the Commonwealth Games. Still, it is a Bollywood star that is on one of the official stamps from the games and not an athlete.

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I’m not afraid of Elvis

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I was looking at the photos from the recent Bhangra Blowout [thanks Amardeep] and was struck by the non-desi dancers in the photos. What confuses me is why I’m surprised at all.

Growing up, NYC was a giant thali of different cultural practices. Black kids did Kung Fu and Lion Dances, Chinese Americans breakdanced and rapped. Culture wasn’t “apna,” it was for anybody willing to put the time in to learn. I probably did as much Irish and Israeli folk dancing (yes, I’m a dork) as a kid as I did Punjabi folk dancing. I should be no more surprised to see a non-Punjabi, non-desi, dancing Bhangra than I am surprised to see a non-Latino doing Salsa, or a non-Korean doing Tae Kwan Do.

Still, I’m not used to it, and I think that other desis are even less used to it than I am. We tend to snark a lot about white people doing puja or yoga, criticizing their pronunciation, saying that they don’t somehow grok the soul of the practice. Well guess what – it’s not going to stop there and we ABCDs are hypocrites if we’re affronted. Let’s be honest, many of us sit here and learn the words to Hindi songs phonetically, just like the non-desi next to us. We’re cosmopolitan, not essentialist, in all other aspects of our lives.

We’re just scared that if somebody else can do these things, these things that we associate with our homes, cook our food, speak our languages, worship our God(s), dance our dances, sing our songs, as well as we can or better that we’ll lose our distinctiveness. That’s understandable but dumb.

Yes, I’m better at dancing Bhangra than most non-desis, but that doesn’t mean that I have the rhythms of Punjab in my veins, just a bit more practice than some. At the end of the day, it’s about talent and enthusiasm, not ancestry (and I cringe equally when I see most non-Punjabi desis dancing Bhangra). It just takes a little while to get used to the fact that these things are now … public, and open to all.

Related posts: White girls in Brooklyn appropriate Saraswati

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Taxi-Wallahs of America

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I spent my spring break last week interviewing taxi drivers about their working conditions, at taxi stands all across Los Angeles. It was my first week of conducting this research and we found handfuls of South Asian taxi drivers, far fewer in proportion to the taxi drivers in other metropolitan cities. I did get the chance to talk to a royal looking Sikh man with expansive white beard, who answered our questions predominantly in proverbs. Mostly though from what I saw, L.A. taxi drivers are immigrants from all over the world all working together in a not so forgiving career.

Taxi-Wallah

Luckily, the research we are doing here in L.A. is based on the success of the taxi worker alliances in New York City and the San Fransisco Bay. If you are in the Berkeley area this week, I highly suggest attending this talk (via The Seemamachine).

On April 5th at 7p, join Biju Mathew, an Associate Professor in the College of Business Administration at Rider University in New Jersey. Biju worked as a lead organizer for one of my all-time favorite organizations, New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance. NYTWA… is headed up by the wondrous Bhairavi Desai, whose leadership and commitment have resulted in health and legal services for NY’s taxi drivers, relief from burdensome and inefficient TLC practices, and a true spirit of organized power for the people that make the Big Apple move. Mathew’s book–Taxi! Cabs & Capitalism in New York City–canvasses the struggles drivers have faced within the taxi cab industry. His lecture will address same.

The lecture will be following the photography exhibit opening of “Taxi-Wallahs of Berkeley: Photographs and Narratives by Aditya Dhawan” hosted by the Center for South Asia Studies. You can see his taxi worker photos online and his exhibit will be running through June. Both events will be on the UC Berkeley campus. In the meantime down here in Los Angeles, I will continue to talk to as many taxi drivers as possible.

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No end in sight

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Two articles out on Monday provide a disturbing glimpse into how some segments of Indian society are “coping” with the ravages of sex selection. The first is from the UK based Independent:

Tripla’s parents sold her for £170 to a man who had come looking for a wife. He took her away with him, hundreds of miles across India, to the villages outside Delhi. It was the last time she would see her home. For six months, she lived with him in the village, although there was never any formal marriage. Then, two weeks ago, her husband, Ajmer Singh, ordered her to sleep with his brother, who could not find a wife. When Tripla refused, he took her into the fields and beheaded her with a sickle.

When Rishi Kant, an Indian human rights campaigner, tracked down Tripla’s parents in the state of Jharkhand and told them the news, her mother broke down in tears. “But what could we do?” she asked him. “We are facing so much poverty we had no choice but to sell her.”

Tripla was a victim of the common practice in India of aborting baby girls because parents only want boys. Although she was born and lived into early adulthood, it was the abortions that caused her death. In the villages of Haryana, just outside Delhi, abortions of baby girls have become so common that the shortage of women is severe. Unable to find wives locally, the men have resorted to buying women from the poorer parts of India. Just 25 miles from the glitzy new shopping malls and apartment complexes of Delhi is a slave market for women. [Link]

Normal laws of supply in demand would have led me to guess that when “enough” girls had been aborted, the ones that survived to birth would eventually become “more valuable” than men. I even imagined a reverse dowery situation as a possibility. Society would finally see the fallacy of its ways when men had nobody to marry. Probably like many who were as naive as me, I never accounted for the fact that a quicker way to deal with the problem was money. Just like there is a black market for kidneys there is growing black market for women.

When the police arrested Tripla’s husband, he could not provide a marriage certificate. Generally, there is no real marriage. The women are sexual “brides” only. Sometimes, brothers who cannot afford more share one woman between them. Often, men who think they have got a good deal on a particularly beautiful bride will sell her at a profit. [Link]

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