Monthly Archives: October 2006

Tunak Tunak Takes Over

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I found another viral video to add to the list of wackiness (Avon Lady, Little Superstar, Nike) we’ve been broadcasting from here at the bunker (thanks sleepy!). Let me present to you Tunak Tunak Jesus Jesus.

I don’t understand one word of the song, but I’m pretty sure that the the subtitles are not telling me what the song is saying.

Manish did a previous post with other earlier video remakes of the song. It has since caught like wildfire. We have of course the original version by Daler Mehndi, A Japanese game show version StarCraft Tunak Tunak, and even for Razib, a Tunak Tunak Brown. There’s even a Tunak Trailer. In fact, a search of Tunak on YouTube shows 321 videos. What is it about this song that can create this viral epidemic?

I think that it’s time for the Tunak Tunak Sepia Mutiny version to be created. I’ll get the monkeys in the bunker working right on it…

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Desi Riot Grrrl

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This weekend, I was in the Bay area to attend a board meeting for the youth publication, Wiretap. Imagine my pleasant surprise to find a fellow desi blogger also on the board with me, Samhita Mukhopadhyay. A former desi riot grrrl, Samhita is now a blogger/editor for the popular Feministing.

The site editors and founders are motivated by their belief that young women are rarely given the opportunity to speak on their own behalf on issues that affect their lives and futures. Feministing aims to provide a platform for women to comment on and analyze these issues. Roughly 25,000 unique users per day visit the site. [link]

Sweet, a young desi voice in the historically non-diverse feminist movement! And a blogger! In a recent interview done with Alternet, Samhita informs us of the intersections of activism and blogging, a topic that I find fascinating and have written about through the lens of the South Asian American movement before.

But aren’t there drawbacks to leading a feminist movement through blogs?

Samhita: Well, this is our activism; engaging with other bloggers. But yeah, we talk all the time about whether or not we are organizing the people we talk about or if we’re just computer nerds. We want to alliance-build. But is it always safe to sit behind your keyboard? No. I still don’t always feel confident or safe…

People come to the site, read my blog and say things like “Don’t get out of hand.” This is still the dominant view, and there is still such a gendered power imbalance, and it’s easy to get caught up in all that and think, “Well, you’re right.” People have told me I’ll never have a journalism career. Some say my writing is unbalanced and anti-white. But it’s not, not in this context. I write what I feel and what I see, through the lens of post-colonial theory.[link]

A quick perusal through her posts on Feministing show entries that do just that and highlight transnational feminist issues: the Hudood Ordinance, Columbian women try sex ban, Pakistani rape laws, and women praying in Mecca.

Back in 2004, I attended the March for Women’s Lives in DC with a small contingent of desi women – all of us decked in ‘This Is What a Feminist Looks Like’ gear. We were the only desi females we saw at the march. This was frustrating particularly because I feel that the desi women issues that affect all of us in this community, are often pushed to the boundaries of the mainstream feminist movement. Our issues of glass ceilings, hate crimes, higher rates of HPV, and lower weight babies are SAA feminist issues. For these reasons, I often feel that there is a certain amount of distance people like to create with the word “feminist”, especially in our community. But what does it really mean?

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A Different Model Indian Minority

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Towards a better, browner future

Not exactly Desi, but interestingly close. Marginal Revolution points us at a NYT article that examines the case of the only county in the nation where the median income for Blacks exceeds that of Whites (51K vs. 46K respectively). The other thing that makes it interesting? It’s residents aren’t traditionally African-American but rather, West Indian.

Despite the economic progress among blacks in Queens, income gaps still endure within the borough’s black community, where immigrants, mostly from the Caribbean, are generally doing better than American-born blacks.

An earlier Malcom Gladwell article looked into some of these disparaties and observed –

…The implication of West Indian success is that racism does not really exist at all–at least, not in the form that we have assumed it does. The implication is that the key factor in understanding racial prejudice is not the behavior and attitudes of whites but the behavior and attitudes of blacks–not white discrimination but black culture. It implies that when the conservatives in Congress say the responsibility for ending urban poverty lies not with collective action but with the poor themselves they are right.

And, as Alex at Marginal Revolution notes, Gladwell tries hard (and somewhat unsuccessfully) to argue against the most obvious implication – put simply that Culture rather than Race is the primary determinant of success.

So what’s the Desi angle here?

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Welcome Grandmaster P!

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We at Sepia Mutiny would like to extend a very snarky hearty welcome to the newest Sepia Macaca: Puran Singh. That’s right – Deep is a daddy! [Mothers everywhere want to know what the rest of us are waiting for]

Puran Singh (“Master P,” as my brother is already calling him) was born yesterday at 8pm. He’s 8 pounds, 2 ounces (3.7 Kg), and both he and his mother are doing well. We have lots of family around helping us out and giving support (thanks, everyone), and the hospital experience has been pretty good, though the final stage of labor was difficult (I guess it always is).

The name means “fulfillment,” “completion,” or “perfection.” No one in our family has been named “Puran,” but there are a couple of famous people who have had this name: including Bhagat Puran Singh and also a famous Punjabi poet. In the Sikh tradition, the first letter of a baby’s name is usually chosen by opening the Guru Granth Sahib at random, and taking a “Vakh.” The first letter of the page opened is supposed to be the first letter of the baby’s name. In our case, we got “P,” and I immediately thought of “Puran…” [Link]

P is for Perfection

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