Monthly Archives: July 2006

The Terrorists Have Won

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…because now, you can’t read Blogspot or Typepad-hosted blogs in India. That means no Barmaid, no Abhi, no MD, no Brimful, no Badmash, no Maisnon. Erstwhile Mutineer Manish has more (natch) on Ultrabrown:

For all the talk of IndiaÂ’s freedom and democracy, the Indian government has apparently just censored all of Blogspot and Typepad. For shame. Blogspot- and Typepad-hosted blogs are inaccessible from my Bombay ISP and many others and seem to be blocked at the Airtel Internet backbone in Delhi. Geocities is reportedly blocked as well.[link]

Sabahat Iqbal Ashraf pointed out the utter lameness of this action via the ASATA mailing list:

As I was saying all along, unenlightened Internet policies are not a Pakistani monopoly; the Indian establishment can be just as “efficient” in the matter. First it was only Pakistan blocking most blogs, now it seems the Indian establishment is getting into the act…

Apparently, terrorists are using blogs to communicate, but Ultrabrown notes that Dr Gulshan Rai, Director of the Computer Emergency Response Team—India (CERT-IN) feigned cluelessness when asked about this unwelcome development:

“Somebody must have blocked some sites. What is your problem?“…

Awesome.

I can’t improve on Manish’s response to that:

As the worldÂ’s back office, for India to blame overzealous techies would hardly be credible. ItÂ’s not yet clear which blogs the government was targeting, but the tactic of banning Blogspot is nothing less than outright repression — mimicking the tactics Pakistan used to shut down discussion of Danish cartoons critical of Islam. India is now in the august company of some of the worldÂ’s least free nations…

…because I’m too busy freaking out over the possibility he raises at the end of his post:

These repeated incidents are also a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on Web apps centralized on a small handful of domains. WhatÂ’ll you do when your government blocks Gmail?

Shivam Vij has a detailed and worrisome post about his telephonic attempts to figure out what the hell is going on, here. He also has a grim sort of workaround, since not all platforms are censored equally:

Is there a moral of the story? Yes, there is. Shift to your own domain and your own hosting and most of all, to WordPress. [link]

…or, click your ruby slippers together thrice and chant, “There’s no speech like free, there’s no speech like free, there’s no speech like… Continue reading →

SAJA: Bold face names

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Dear readers, we know you want the good stuff and nothing but. ItÂ’s all about style and celebrity! So hereÂ’s the inside skinny on this weekendÂ’s sizzling SAJA session, live from prestigious Columbia University!………All these phantastic photos are by regular commenter Preston Merchant, the desiest white guy youÂ’ll ever meet………Heck, he lives in Jackson Heights and heÂ’s even got a Parsi name! We love you Preston!

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Prolific New York Times-man Vikas Bajaj, the conventionÂ’s president, sure made the most of his position. LetÂ’s just say the cherubic correspondent won attention from some not-so-Gray ladies!………HeÂ’s here, heÂ’s there, heÂ’s everywhere – SAJA spiritual leader and networking machine Sree Sreenivasan was the host with the utmost. The J-school juggernaut jabberwock and new media maven lived all the way up to his rep. He even hosted a packed panel on blogging for beginners! Powerhouse wife and rifle champ Roopa and terrific twin tykes Durga and Krishna made this a family affair!

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Dashing Riz Khan showed why heÂ’s the face of Al-JazeeraÂ’s new English-language channel. The tall caramel smoothie kept the crowd in stiches and reddened the cheeks of at least one lady! HeÂ’ll need to keep his mind out of the Qatar if he wants to top those Emi-ratings!………We missed some of the other plenaries, but our trusted sources tell us NBC anchorman Brian Williams was a barrel of laughs!………No, seriously! Guess he must not have talked about the future of network news!………Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian affairs Richard Boucher broke from the Bush bandÂ’s behavior with a candid conversation on US foreign policy!………Not! Survivors said his soporific speech produced little more than ZzzzÂ’s! The Mumbai bombings were barely discussed! Continue reading →

This is Gunga Din, reporting for NPR

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Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me this morning made reference to a recent foot-in-mouth remark by White House Spokesman Tony Snow (who used to be at NPR):

“One of the problems with NPR is that there is so much political correctness that if you’ve got a name that looks like it was made up by Rudyard Kipling , you’ve got a better chance of getting hired. I’m a white guy named Tony Snow for heaven’s sake. That’s as white as it goes.” [Link]

This remark got very little coverage by either mainstream or blog media and took some digging to find. It seems to have slipped by most people’s radar screens.

I’m aghast at the very casualness of the race baiting involved in that sentence. Oh yes, those brown people with the funny names, the ones who are taking over NPR by virtue of their skin color, not their talent (How many desis are at NPR anyway?). At the same time, I recognize that it is clearly less of a deal than Joe Biden’s recent remarks, which to me were just a minor kerfuffle I recognize that this is a minor rather than major political sin.

Still, Snow’s remarks are eminently cringeworthy and the sort of thing that brown people should both remember and remind him about, just so that he learns the utter gaucheness of what he said.

“Mr. Snow, this is Somini Sengupta from the Times … one of those reporters with a “Kipling Name” … I’d like to ask you about the President’s policy on …”

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55Friday: The “Original Sin” Edition

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This marks the second time that fellow Mutiny-organizer Amardeep has inspired the theme for our Friday 55 Flash Fiction orgy; what might be even more amusing is that as with last time, today’s post is about…relationships. Hmm. I think I’ll start calling him Dr. Drew instead of Dr. Deep. 😉

Seven hours and over 100 comments later, the discussion roars on about Blacks dating Asians, Asians dating Whites, Whites dating Blacks…yet curiously enough, no one seems to be dating Latinos. 😀 Silly rabbits, don’t you know your roots are in the sand?

I keed. What I am consummately serious about, however, is nanofiction. Tiny little stories with exactly 55 words– what could be better? Ah yes…one from YOU. As always, you are welcome to write about topics of all colors, shapes and sizes, but for those of you who like the bondage of instructions, you’ve got ’em. Please leave your mini-masterpiece in the comments below; meanwhile, I’m going to try and get one catchy INXS tune out of my head. Continue reading →

“Black Men, Asian Women” Article by Rinku Sen

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Since I don’t watch these television shows, it’s a bit dicey to comment on the spate of shows featuring romances between black men and asian women, so I’ll let Rinku Sen do it for me: parminder_er.jpg

The sugary romance between the excessively noble characters played by Parminder Nagra and Shafiq Atkins on ER follows the much hotter one between Ming Na Wen and Mekhi Phifer that ended two seasons ago. GreyÂ’s Anatomy features Sandra Oh in an up-and-down relationship with Isaiah Washington.

What accounts for such interest? ItÂ’s as though these couples have been pouring out of medical schools and producers decided to capture the trend.

The representations tread the line between cultural authenticity, sometimes considered stereotype, and colorblindness. The women exhibit some level of conflict with their cultures and are slightly neurotic: Ming Na dreaded telling her immigrant parents that she was having a baby out of wedlock; Nagra quit her job in a bout of rebellion against family expectation to work as a convenience store clerk. The men are dangerous but tender. Phifer grew up without a father and has a temper; Gallant went off to serve in Iraq. I did laugh at the effort to bridge cultures, though, when NagraÂ’s character got married wearing a white sari. White is the Hindu color of mourning.(link)

If it’s on TV, is it a reflection of a real sociological trend, or simply a convenient image of happy multiculturalism from television fantasy-land? Continue reading →

The tiffinwalla approach to fighting terror

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I’ve been thinking about what sort of systems should be put into place to try to prevent further attacks as in Mumbai. I don’t mean this to be callous. I too have family in Bombay, and while they’re OK, my heart still aches for those whose family is not. But the trains are running once more and need to be protected. [This is also some very abstract thinking, so I might be and Mumbaikar reveals, in the comments, that I am entirely talking out of my kundi.]

One solution, as Manish argues, would be to close the entire system and control access:

What it would take to solve the bombs-on-trains problem: money, lots of money. Indian Railways needs to run more frequent trains so they’re not jammed all the time. The stations need to be fully enclosed so entrance can be precisely controlled. And, like on Eurostar high-speed trains, every passenger needs to be scanned for explosives. [Link]

Something like this is done in the New Delhi Metro system. Although there was no mechanical sniffer, at many stops passengers were patted down or wanded by bored jawans. However, it strikes me that this is the wrong path, similar to trying to create a computerized tiffin system in Bombay. Sure it might work, but you’d need continuous electricity and literate tiffin carriers. Instead, India currently has something better. Using a system of painted symbols on each tiffin carrier:

Five thousand tiffinwallas deliver 175,000 hot lunches from home to work every day, and empty tiffins back home, with only one error every 16 million deliveries. [Link]

India works best when its ample semi-skilled labor applies simple rules repeatedly and rigidly. I’m trying to think about how to best reduce security risk by applying India’s comparative advantage, rather than imposing an alien solution. Continue reading →

Last Call

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It was my intention to go out in Style&Snark, involving some kind of LiveBloggingEvent or Recap of Priya&Divya’s Super Sweet 16. But in light of Tuesday’s gripping events on a subcontinent where the Innocent&Hardworking cram 15-per-square meter traveling to and from work in order to put food on the table in the pursuit of better tomorrows, the trivial voyeuristic judgment of affluent, ill-mannered, hyphenated-American teenagers and the parents who indulge them suddenly seemed all the more irrelevant.

In my Sepia denouement, it seemed appropriate to disclose one small confession: I’m scared of Indians. Like, terrified. Like, if everyone in the last comment thread was standing together in a room, it would take me several cocktails to muster the courage to enter. And one of those cocktails would probably have to include some ratio of 151.

Seriously. Continue reading →

Investment undeterred by fear

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It is comforting to note that in these times of terror, hard-headed businessmen still make their investment decisions undeterred by threat. My newest hero is that Titan of Industry, the Captain of Capitalism, Laxmi Mittal. It seems that the world’s richest Indian is increasing his investment in India-na:

Mittal Steel Co. plans to begin a $10 million expansion of research and development laboratories in East Chicago. The first phase, to start this week, would add 22,000 square feet to a laboratory. It is expected to be completed within a year. The company is based in the Netherlands, but its U.S. operations are run from Chicago. [Link]

This announcement came the day after it was revealed that India-na is the state in the union most densely populated with potential terrorist targets:

Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation. [Link]

That’s 11% of all targets on the National Asset Database. This is a state so hated by terrorists that even a rural popcorn factory with five employees is considered a target! Clearly Mittal is a man of steel, a hombre without fear, somebody who does not blanch even in the face of terrorists as confused as Christopher Columbus. Who needs Hanu-man, Indian Super-man, a brown Justice League, or any other Indian superheroes when we have a Mittal-man of our own ?

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A Gujarati Connection?

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On Monday of this week I wrote this post (Lingering Tension in Gujarat) examining a Christian Science Monitor article on the growing powder keg of tensions in the Indian state of Gujarat (where my family emigrated from). The very next day the Mumbai Train Attacks occurred. Could these two seemingly unrelated topics be somehow related? I am the LAST person to jump to conclusions involving terrorism but I do want to point out some facts that the media is now reporting. In the passages below I have highlighted facts so as to separate from rumor:

Gujarat appears to loom large over the Mumbai blasts. That’s apparently why terrorists targeted only the Western Railway tracks and that too only first-class coaches.

Sources said the aim apparently was to hit moneyed Gujaratis, many of whom stay in suburbs of Vile Parle, Kandivli, Malad and Borivli along the Western Railway and travel first class.

The Lashkar-e-Taiba, intelligence reports suggest, has recruited local youths saying that they should take revenge for the atrocities heaped on the minority community in Gujarat where the Narendra Modi government is heavily funded by the rich Gujarati businessmen of Mumbai.

It is not for nothing that Modi is coming here early next week to meet community leaders. [Link]

What else do we know?

The aftershocks of Tuesday’s serial blasts in Mumbai shook Gujarat deeply. A large number of people killed and injured were Gujaratis.

At least seven people, mostly diamond traders, were killed in the blasts, while another eight diamond traders were reported to be missing till Wednesday evening. [Link]

Here is more:

The Railways on Wednesday cancelled the Shatabdi Express from Ahmedabad and Mumbai and three trains originating from Mumbai.

The 2010 Shatabdi from Ahmedabad to Mumbai and its counterpart from Mumbai Train 2009, the 9023 Ferozepur Express, the 9215 Saurashtra Express from Mumbai to Ahmedabad and the 239B Ahmedabad passenger train have also been cancelled for the day. [Link]

Continue reading →