Monthly Archives: July 2006

Goyal not always so mild-mannered

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In the daily Whitehouse press briefing a few hours ago, Tony Snow was getting some tough questions about the happenings in Lebabon and whether the U.S. was taken by surprise at some of the developments there:

Q If the reports are correct, and we, in fact, didn’t know about the weapons advances that Hezbollah has made, is there some frustration or embarrassment within the intelligence community at the moment?

MR. SNOW: Well, you’ve asked me one of those “ifs,” and then the answer is, I don’t know what the knowledge was about intelligence; therefore, I can’t answer it. Sorry, Victoria.

Q Well, it seems certainly according to the reports that we didn’t know that they had made significant advances.

MR. SNOW: Again, I don’t know. [Link]

So what do you do next if you are Snow? I am disappointed by ANY SM readers that don’t already know the answer:

Goyal.

Q Tony, two questions. One, last night celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Indian-American Friendship Council, Dr. Krishna Reddy he got over 120 members of Congress from both sides — senators and congressmen on Capitol Hill — and they were all supporting the U.S.-India civil nuclear agreement. And which yesterday you mentioned that G8 also — Prime Minister of India and the President had discussion on the same issue.

So now next month, there will be voting — final voting in the U.S. Congress. So where is the President now? How he is taking this approach —

MR. SNOW: The President supports the agreement. He made it clear to Prime Minister Singh. He’s made it clear to members of Congress. So far the votes have been overwhelmingly in favor in committee, and we’ll just have to see how it proceeds. I mean, that’s a no-brainer. [Link]

Was Snow subtly implying that Goyal’s question was a no-brainer? Snow soon found out that even Goyal, when backed into a corner with his pride on the line, can take a swing by asking a tough question. You won’t like him when he’s angry. Continue reading →

On the Radio Tonight: Class relations in India

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A heads-up: Radio Open Source is doing a special show on class relations in India tonight at 7pm Eastern Time. It’s partly inspired by the recent Pankaj Mishra Op-Ed we discussed a little last week, which challenged the myth of the booming “new India.”

This isn’t more “negative” talk about India’s poverty or backwardness. I talked to the show’s producer (Robin) a bit on the phone last week, and what I got from her is that they don’t really want to do either a “negative” or “positive” spin on India. They also don’t want to throw around a lot of general economic statistics (GDP, economic growth indicators, etc.), since those things don’t tell you very much about how and whether people’s lives have been affected by the changes that have been occurring since the early 1990s. Rather, they simply want to explore the changes socially, culturally, and historically, and understand it as realistically and completely as possible. And to do that, they want illustrative anecdotes and first hand testimony from a range of sources and perspectives.

It’s a very noble and unusual approach for a radio show to take, and I’ll be listening in to see how it goes. ROS is unique in that they often take comments posted on the blog and cite them in the on-air discussion. So if you have something to say on this topic, I suggest you go to their site and leave some comments; they might quote you on the air.

Incidentally, if you miss the show, they generally put up podcasts a few days after the show airs. Continue reading →

Taking the “C” out of ABCD

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Here is a snippet of South Asian focused children’s literature, from the website of the dedicated magazine Kahani:

Kayan’s grandfather walked in. He held something shiny in his hand.

“What is it, Ajoba?” Sarika said. Their grandfather held up a silver coin.

“It’s just a coin,” Kayan said.

Ajoba shook his head. He placed the coin on one palm and rubbed his hands together quickly. Then he held up his hands. The coin was gone.

“Wow!” Sarika said. “Neat.” Kayan’s eyes widened.

“A magic coin,” Ajoba said.

Another snippet and some illustrations are available at the magazine’s website. One of its contributors is SM regular Pooja Makhijani, who has a nice personal essay on the topic of desi children’s lit at PaperTigers.org, a website on Asian-American writing for kids:

As I was growing up, I would search library shelves in the hopes of finding a character “like me”. I never had much luck. One day, my elementary school librarian excitedly handed me a tattered copy of The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. “It’s set in India,” she squealed. “It’s the perfect book for you!”

Shockingly, Pooja did not find herself identifying with Mowgli. But one day at the library, she ran into a book called Dancing Princess:

Dancing Princess was a historical novel set in 16th century India during the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Although Allaedi, the main character, wasn’t exactly like me, she was close enough. We were both brown haired, brown eyed, brown skinned girls and we both loved to dance. I renewed that book again and again, carefully scrawling my name onto the index card pasted on the inside back cover each week.

Continue reading →

Biden’s claims corroborated

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Coming out hot and fresh on the heels of Donutgate, The Delaware News Journal has done some great investigative reporting to corroborate Sen. Joesph Biden’s disturbing claim that, “You cannot go into a Dunkin Donuts or a 7-Eleven unless you have a slight Indian accent.” There are in fact a lot of Indian Americans working at donut shops in Delaware, and signed affidavits suggest that some of them do in fact have Indian accents. It is therefore not inconceivable that some of them may in fact bar entry to non-Indian accented speakers.

In the 16 years since Nilesh “Nick” Patel’s family bought their first Dunkin’ Donuts franchise, they’ve built a string of a dozen shops in northern Delaware and southern Pennsylvania.

“It’s been a great business for us,” said the 32-year-old Patel, whose family moved to the United States from India when he was 10 to carve out a middle-class lifestyle. “We all have cars and houses and mortgages now. Our kids are getting a good education.”

Delaware’s Indian population has nearly tripled in recent years, and a big chapter of their story is being played out in the state’s doughnut shops, liquor stores, gas stations and hotels, business owners and experts said. The owners of those businesses are adding a middle-class flavor to an immigrant community that once was composed mainly of doctors, engineers and scientists, they said. [Link]

My sources in the Justice Department tell me that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was considering launching an investigation into the veracity of Biden’s earlier claims when the Delaware News Journal supplied the FBI with a smoking gun of sorts: desis holding warm and fresh donuts but denying them to non-Indian accented customers.

The evidence caught on film

Continue reading →

Yeh Shaam Mastani

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dishoom

Toronto Mutineers, hitch up your lungis and roll those kurta sleeves because the Indian Electronica festival is coming to your town. Festival mastermind Qasim Virjee, he of Dishoom fame, has brought together some choice performers like LAL, Omnesia ensemble, dancer Monkia Monga, and of course himself, as his badass alter-ego, Abdul Smooth.

Hot deets, get your hot deets right here:

When? Thursday, July 20th
Where? El Mocambo (464 Spadina, just South of College)
How? Tickets are $10 online, $15 at the door
No really, when? Keynote on ‘Developments in South Asian music since the Asian Underground’ at 8 pm, first act is up at 9 pm
What should I bring? A camera if you’ve got one because that SM flickr group is looking kinda skimpy.
Will Neha be there even though she has a deadly meeting at 9 on Friday? Hell yes!

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For those on the other side of the pond, take in the festival’s August installment in London town. Featuring the likes of Pathaan, Bobby Friction, DhakFu, Eagle-i, Ges-e, Nerm/the Shiva Soundsystem, Fusing Naked Beats, Yam Boy, and Visionary Underground. Continue reading →

Ringtone race wars

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I guess IÂ’m behind the times: It hadnÂ’t occurred to me that cellphone ringtones might be a medium for propagating nasty messages. But of course upon thinking about it, it makes sense. HereÂ’s an unpleasant little situation from South Africa, as reported today by the BBC:

A racist mobile phone ringtone has been condemned by South Africa authorities in the city of Cape Town.

The lyrics are in Afrikaans and advocate violence against black people in derogatory terms. Â…

The lyrics of the song, according to a local newspaper, refer to a black person as a “kaffir” – an outlawed and derogatory term in South Africa.

It describes how such a person should be tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged around while driving.

The chorus has a blatantly racist tone and ends with a call to set dogs on the black person.

Shades of Jasper, Texas: lovely. Intrigued, I wondered if other racist ringtone incidents were on record, especially in the United States. I found an entirely different kind of story – one that illuminates in several ways the limitations of the political conversation in America today. Back in May, Cingular had to pull an offensive ringtone after protests by Latino organizations:

The ringtone played the sound of a siren and then a voice that said: “Calmate, calmate, this is la migra. Por favor, put the oranges down and step away from the cell phone. I repeat-o, put the oranges down and step away from the telephone-o. I’m deporting you back home-o.” Cingular says it will put more efforts in reviewing ringtones that are submitted to them by a variety of providers.

Up-and-down case, no? Except that the provider of this ringtone wasÂ… a Miami company, Barrio Mobile, staffed by Latinos and aimed at the Latino market. Gearlog picks up the story: Continue reading →

“But I Warn You, They Are Not As Peaceful As Me”

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Community leaders from Tower Hamlets, London have started a campaign against the filming of Monica Ali’s 2003 novel Brick Lane. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a big commercial and critical success. Reactions by many South Asian readers I heard from were mixed, mainly because of Ali’s use of a kind of pidgin English in the letters from the main character’s sister in Bangladesh, Hasina. (Our blog-friend DesiDancer also had a succinct review: “utter crap”, were her delicate, carefully chosen words)

Of course, the quality of the book is mostly irrelevant to the censorship campaign under way. This campaign seems to be an extension of the campaign against the book itself in 2003, and includes some of the same players and the same sad rhetoric of outrage and offense that is routinely trotted out these days in response to something or other:

In an echo of the controversy which surrounded the initial publication of the book, set partly in the east London borough, the novel is accused of reinforcing “pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes” and of containing “a most explicit, politically calculated violation of the human rights of the community”.

Community leaders attacked the book on its publication in 2003, claiming that it portrayed Bangladeshis living in the area as backward, uneducated and unsophisticated, and that this amounted to a “despicable insult”. (link)

The misguided attempt to protect the community’s honor through censorship will be ineffective, and the censorship campaign itself has the ironic effect of making the community look really, really bad. Continue reading →

Mole Revealed in GTA Bomb Plot

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shaikh-mubin060713.jpg June’s terror raids in Toronto that ended with the arrest of 12 men and 5 youth came as a shock to the general Canadian public. In my household it raised more than few questions on how exactly the RCMP came to know minute details of the group’s activities, which resulted in some very specific terror-related charges. What we decided as the best answer is not much of a surprise. Attempting to charge someone with plotting to blow up the CBC and beheading the Prime Minister becomes easier with a pair of ears and eyes on the inside.

Mubin Shaikh is the 30-year-old son of Indian immgrants who spent six years in the Royal Canadian Army Cadets and embraced Islam 10 years ago, after taking in trips to South Asia and the Middle East. He is a fierce supporter of Sharia law in Ontario and runs Canada’s only Sharia law arbitration centre. He is about as orthodox as Ontario Muslims come. Mubin Shaikh is also a mole. Continue reading →

Sink or Swim: the M. Night Shyamalan Media Circus

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24night.jpe The publicity build-up for M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, The Lady in the Water (opening this coming Friday), has begun with some shatteringly bad buzz. It’s too bad, because I’ve been a fan of Shyamalan’s four major films, even the ones that haven’t had a great critical reception. (The Village, for instance, offered a nice critique of religious fundamentalism, I thought. And isn’t The Sixth Sense really a film about reincarnation and the Hindu/Buddhist concept of Moksha, albeit explored through the proxy of Catholicism?)

Some of the publicity isn’t so bad. To begin with, Shyamalan’s got two profiles in the east coast papers today, one in the New York Times and another in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Inquirer likes him, because he’s a local boy and he’s stayed local: he owns a house in Gladwyne (not far from where I live, actually), and created a monster set in nearby Levittown for Lady in the Water. The Times is a little more lukewarm, focusing on a silly trick documentary shot (with Shyamalan’s approval) to accompany the release of The Village, and on Shyamalan’s apparently rampant narcissism.

Shyamalan has probably helped to undo his mystique a bit by taking himself too seriously. There is a sketchy-looking biography of him coming out this Thursday, called The Man Who Heard Voices: How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career On a Fairy Tale. From this New York Times review, the book looks highly embarrassing. Among other things, it details Shyamalan’s split with Disney during the early phase of script-writing. And while some of the reasons Shyamalan gives for the split seem like good ones (Disney “wasn’t allowing it to be visceral”), others seem pretty trivial: he apparently wasn’t happy with how his assistant was treated by Disney’s executives; and he was annoyed they didn’t want him to cast himself in one of the major roles. Continue reading →

Field of dreams

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Kevin Garnett, the long-suffering anchor of the never-quite-there Minnesota Timberwolves, has been pumping up India’s basketball prospects while on an Asian publicity tour. (Thanks, tipster Kumar!) Garnett said he felt a lot of enthusiasm for the sport in India, and suggested the country might emerge into the world game in the same way that China has started to do behind Yao Ming.

Of course, until some Indian school or club produces a 7-foot freak of nature with half decent ball handling skills, this scenario will lack a crucial component for take-off. Better perhaps to take the grassroots approach, as another major American sports organization, Major League Baseball, is doing. In November, after the US season is over, MLB’s Envoy Program will send a team of coaches to conduct a month of baseball clinics in five Indian cities: Delhi, Bombay, Chennai, Calcutta, and Imphal.

Uh… Imphal?

I know you don’t need me to tell you where Imphal is! It’s the capital of Manipur, of course, a largely “tribal” state in India’s far northeast. Seems like baseball has been thriving in Manipur for several decades, ever since (it is thought) American troops deployed there introduced it during World War II.

“Thriving” is a relative term, of course, since there isn’t a single dedicated baseball diamond in the state. However there are 26 organized men’s baseball clubs, 4 women’s teams, and a governing association; they play a regular season, improvising diamonds on fields borrowed from other sports.

A New York and Imphal venture called First Pitch is working on promoting Manipur baseball and raising funds to build a dedicated baseball stadium and equip the teams. A local club has already donated land. The project’s American chair, Muriel Peters, and Manipuri executive director, Somi Roy, both come from the film world. Director Mirra Bank is filming a documentary. A five-minute promo by a Manipuri director set to a translation of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is here.

Perhaps a part of this venture’s appeal in the philanthropic world is that it’s just that little bit hokey. But who knows? Perhaps a generation from now, Manipuri players will be commonplace in the American game. That’s why they call it Field of Dreams… Continue reading →