If you’re a brown, black, diasporic, immigrant, mixed-race, or otherwise socially and culturally hybrid, globalization-era American, it looks like someone is seriously getting into the 2008 presidential race who has more in common with you, identity-wise, than any previous presidential candidate. This is going to be interesting! Continue reading
Monthly Archives: January 2007
The Kids Are Alright
Intentblog, the weblog aggregation of the Chopra spiritual-aspirational empire, is a strange mishmash of largely desi-written key-issues insight (Sepia friend Dave Sidhu), New Age preening (nympho-striver Saira Mohan), and general bloviating (too many to list), generating awkward, fawning comments, many of which seem to be from Polish guys named Marek looking for a date.
Amid all this are entries from the Chopras themselves, including the big man and his progeny. Of these, the oddly-spelled Gotham has earned some visibility for his own projects and initiatives beyond the family business. These include the Virgin Comics line of desi superhero tales, which I’ve seen a couple of copies of and look pretty damn cool, even to my untrained eye, and more dubious ventures like the midtown Manhattan “Kama Sutra-themed” K Lounge, which one astute Citysearch user reviewed as follows: “Pros: easy jersey booty; Cons: bad bartenders, bad jersey booty.” We’ve also mentioned Gotham here in the mutiny’s early days, smoking out various fans, haters and impersonators in the process.
Lately Gotham’s been waxing worried about the decline of desi cultural identity in the multiculti American stew, having traveled to the belly of the beast — the notorious SASA conference which Abhi roundly dissed yesterday — and been horrified by the brown binge-drinking buffoons and playa and hoochie wannabes he found setting the tone of the proceedings. Gotham was so alienated that he had to move out of the conference hotel to a more spiritually centered location. After several days of processing, he wrote this cri de coeur, and though I admit I’m vacillating in my tone here between snark and sympathy, I have to say I feel for the brother. Here’s what he saw:
I, myself, am only 30 years old but found myself so shockingly displaced from the South Asian community congregated down at the conference that I’ve been unable to articulate my thoughts the last few days and even blog about it. This is my best shot.
Thr primary focus, it seemed, amongst the over 1000 20-somethings (and yes, this is a broad generalization so take it for what it is) was oft articulated by the attendees themselvs, was to ‘get drunk and hook up.’ Not unlike, their other generational brethrens of any other cultural or racial background…
Not surprising in itself, he says, but here’s the real problem: Continue reading
My Neighbor, The Terrorist
Kal plays Ahmed Amar, a teenager living in suburban Los Angeles. A suicide bomber has just blown up a bus downtown. We meet Amar when the FBI arrives in the suburbs to take his father away for reasons unknown to viewers. A drunk neighbor, Stan, watches Amar’s father being taken away and proceeds to attack Amar, calling him a terrorist. The kind liberal Mr. Wallace, who lives across the street, witnesses the attack and intervenes, gently saying, “Stan, he’s no more of a terrorist than you or me.”
The Wallace family takes Amar in. Ironically, Amar then receives a phone call from (gasp) an evil Muzzie terrorist, Fayed, the cartoonish archvillain of the show. Amar proceeds to hold the family hostage, demanding that Mr. Wallace deliver a package to Fayed. (He can’t do it himself, because he’s injured from the hate crime.) When Mr. Wallace’s teenage son asks, “Why are you doing this? We’re friends,” Amar responds, “We’re friends?! You can’t even pronounce my name. It’s not Aw-med. It’s ACCCCCCH-med.” (And it’s not Kal Penn, it’s Kalpen Modi.) Mr. Wallace later proclaims, “Stan was right. You are a terrorist.” Mr. Wallace then leaves to deliver the package. A little while later, counter-terrorist agents enter, killing Amar and saving the Mrs. and younger Wallace. But it’s too late. The delivered package helps set off a “suitcase nuke,” presumably killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. Continue reading
SAAN 2007 Conference
I just wanted to remind you students out there, particularly those who live in the Midwest, that you can still sign up for the SAAN 2007 Conference at the University of Michigan on the January 26-28th weekend. I spoke at last year’s conference (along with current guest blogger Preston Merchant) and re-capped the fabulousness of it all here.
SAAN’s primary function is to establish an annual South Asian conference for South Asian and non-South Asian students alike. SAAN 2007: Reveal, Rethink, Realize will be the fifth annual holding of this conference, and we hope to continue setting a precedent that all future SAAN conferences will follow. SAAN 2007 will be held January 26-28th at the University of Michigan Union. [Link]
For those of you who are wondering, SAAN is like the anti-SASA. No crazy partying, no SWAT teams, no drunken fights. Just good people, good learning, and great networking. Here is this year’s line-up. I am sure you will recognize many of the names on the list. Among them is Dr. Rajmohan Gandhi, the biographer and grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. Some of the workshops look pretty interesting also. These two stand out (for me at least):
Do Nice Guys Finish Last? – Does leading an ethical life limit your ambitions? As we climb the ladder, should we hush our ethical voice for personal gain? For instance, if you see your boss engaging in sexual harassment, will you stay silent? Will you be totally honest on your resume? Or will you start a pseudo-student group just so you can add another leadership position on your resume? This workshop will examine the interplay between ethics and ambition in our lives…Mohammad, Vishnu, and Darwin – We always hear about the conflict between the Bible and evolution. But how do South Asian religions reconcile religious and scientific beliefs?… [Link]
Don’t be lazy. Sign up here. It’s cheap and if you don’t like your experience you can totally rip me a new one in the comments section without being banned. I’m that confident in my recommendation.
DJ Rekha Rocks CES
Last week, the never ending drumbeat of biz travel took me to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The show was, to put it mildy, a zoo – even by Vegas standards. If you aren’t a fan of the teeming throngs of humanity (over 150K in this case), then CES probably isn’t your schtick. First, take the surrealness that’s Vegas any other time of the year. Then, crank it up by putting a substantial portion of the export sales of East Asia on the line. Sprinkle in “kick off the year” business frenzy and you end up with the pomp and circumstance that’s CES.
While the show itself borders on obscene with the high end electronics, walls o’ plasmas, booth babes, audio equipment, cars, cellphones, computers and so on…. the real craziness happens after convention hours. There, Fortune 100 companies revert to playground one-upsmanship but on a multi-million dollar scale with dinner banquets, parties, concerts and the sorts of gala’s you can only have in Las Vegas. Like many things related to biz travel, it sounds like it might be sorta fun — and it is, at first — but the whole thing becomes a little numbing after a while.
As I’ve mentioned in previous blogposts, my company is heavily involved in the nascent “mobile broadcast” space — put simply, it’s where television and mobile phones intersect. And the CES-highlight for our space was Verizon’s announcment that their MobileTV service will launch in late 1Q / 2007.
To celebrate this & a few other announcements, Verizon rented out the world famous Nobu restaurant at the Hard Rock. Their party was first class all the way with Nobu’s reknowned sushi chefs taking guests’ orders in realtime and hand filling them on the spot — ensuring no more than a few precious seconds from when the roll is expertly patted closed to landing in your convention starved mouth.
So, in the midst of all this mass market, Vegas-kitsch tinged, first-class-ness, imagine how cool it was to discover they had hired DJ Rekha to lay down the beat in the main tent…
To the Mountaintop
I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment [December 1964] when twenty-two million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice. I accept this award in behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice.
I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeing to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. And only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sanctuary to those who would not accept segregation. …
After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time — the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.
Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, December 10, 1964 Continue reading
Ascension
Swamini A. C. Turiyasangitananda, who passed away on Friday in Los Angeles, was a working-class, African-American daughter of Detroit who embraced her spiritual calling nearly 40 years ago:
During the end of 1968, Swamini, directed by God, entered a most significant period of isolation. The Supreme Lord provided wisdom, knowledge, guidance, and instruction consonant with and essential to her designated lifeÂ’s tenure… Swamini received her initiation into the renounced order of sannyas directly from the Supreme Lord. … Swamini took mantra initiation with Swami Satchidananda.
It was a time of great cultural turmoil and motion in American society, and Swamini had found herself at the heart of it. Known to the secular world as Alice McCleod Coltrane, she met John Coltrane in 1962, married him in 1965, and joined his band, playing piano and other instruments, in 1966. After his death of liver disease in the summer of 1967, she continued on both tracks of the path they had traveled together: the musical and the spiritual. Journey in Satchidananda, the album she released in 1970 featuring among others Rashied Ali, Charlie Haden and Pharoah Sanders, is an early document of her progress and the depth of her research and dedication. It still listens well today, one of the strongest surviving documents of the sincere fascination the creative music scene had with both Indian music and Hindu spirituality at that time, a far cry from the more superficial flirtations of the Beatles or the ephemeral Haight-Ashbury philosopher-kings.
For the rest of her life Alice was considered a recluse, recording at a limited pace and rarely appearing in concert; her vow of sanyas and commitment to the spiritual life meant that she spent most of her time at home with her family, at the ashram she founded in the Santa Monica Hills, or traveling to India to worship with Sri Satya Sai Baba.
In 2004, Alice Coltrane released a spectacular album called Translinear Light. It features sons Ravi and Oran on saxophones, Jeff “Tain” Watts and Jack DeJohnette on drums, and once again Charlie Haden — a veteran of the final Coltrane bands and a deep humanist, in addition to a master of his instrument — on bass. (The group conducted a rare tour last fall, and I am sad that I missed their October gig at NJPAC in Newark. It’s a reminder that one must never miss an opportunity to see a great master perform as you never know when she will be taken from us.)
The passing of Alice Coltrane is a sad moment for jazz. It is also an chance for those of us who live at the intersection of American and South Asian cultures to honor someone who embraced that conversation at a very deep, creative level. On the day we honor Martin Luther King, Jr., who learned so much from Gandhiji, it’s another fitting reminder that the conversation has a rich history, and that its potential is far from exhausted. Continue reading
An Afternoon With Yahya
The middle of an academic’s winter break is the perfect time to be saddled with irritating errands. In this case, I had been commissioned to stay home on a Friday afternoon so a SatTV (fake name) technician could fix the problems we’ve been having with our Hindi-language channels.
SatTV is essentially a hive of incompetent technicians. A previous technician had come a month earlier. He spent five minutes looking around, cursed the installation guy that had preceded him, and declared there was nothing he could do. Though Yahya too would also accomplish nothing in the three hours he spent in my house, he was at least more interesting to talk to.
When he told me his name, I said, “oh, like the famous Pakistani general” (fortunately, I did not say “dictator”). He was impressed, it seemed, by my knowledge of history, and it started us on a good footing. He said he was from Sialkot, and industrial town in a Punjabi speaking area. Yahya himself was Punjabi, though to my relief he seemed perfectly happy to speak in English — his English was confident and effective, though lacking in the grammatical niceties that come with years of English-medium schooling. To begin with, he came to the U.S. fifteen years ago, to work as a chef. Yes, a chef: he said he had studied at a culinary institute in Lahore, and then worked as an executive chef at a “five star hotel” there before coming to Philadelphia with his wife. Continue reading
Literary Festival Saps Tsunami Aid…Is that Bad?
Hello again, my Sepia friends! I’m delighted to say our mutinous overlords invited me back as a part-timer here at the bunker, and I promise not to abuse the privilege. (But did you feel that shudder? Those were standards being dropped.)
So as I cast about for something to write about besides boys and terrorist envoys, I found this item in the news tab (thanks Gujulicious): Sri Lanka hosted a literary festival this weekend in Galle, a beautiful city on the Southern coast with a uniquely Dutch heritage.
Attended by non other than the freshly minted Booker winner, Kiran Desai, The Galle Literary Festival billed itself as “Sri Lanka’s first literary festival” and announced noble goals:
Our objectives are to raise the awareness of the increasing depth and diversity of Sri Lankan writings in English, to give Sri Lankan writers an equal platform to their international colleagues, to encourage the use of English among young people and to attract visitors from overseas to visit Galle and the Southern Province.link
But Sri Lanka already has a National Literary Festival, as bureaucratic and stodgy as it may be. And the founder of this Galle festival appears to be an Anglo-Australian hotelier, Geoffrey Dobbs, who has a vested interested in drawing affluent tourists to his Galle hotels and resorts. And this same Geoffrey Dobbs also founded a a tsunami relief organization, Continue reading
Emerald City Burning
When the topic of Iraq comes up in conversations with my friends and acquaintances these days (which is sadly increasingly rare) I generally encounter one of two types of attitudes. The first one, from people on the political left and center, is one of utter exasperation and hopelessness. Not only have we lost, we’ve failed so badly that we may as well leave the stadium and get to our cars as fast as possible to avoid the traffic jam and the inevitable rowdiness soon to be displayed by the opposition. The second attitude, from those who still inexplicably cling to the right-of-center view on Iraq, is one that features mindless tu quoque utterances: “Well, at least it is better than Saddam.” What I fear, however, is that both sides are so frustrated that they no longer care what is going on over there. Even as Bush’s poll numbers plummet, more American soldiers die, and death squads roam Baghdad’s streets (something that even laymen easily predicted two full years ago), the conflict is ever evolving. It is imperative that we recognize that evolution and not think that it is simply business as usual over there. It is in fact getting far worse every day, and in historically predictable ways.
Three articles published on Sunday collectively do a fine job of bringing us all up to speed on where things stand at the present and why adding 20,000 additional troops is nothing but the final desperate maneuver of a man who was always ten steps behind. The first article comes to us from Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City. In it he describes how the Bush administration is rounding up all the people that it originally thought didn’t understand the situation in Iraq, and is now asking them to salvage what little they can of the mess.
Timothy M. Carney went to Baghdad in April 2003 to run Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Unlike many of his compatriots in the Green Zone, the rangy, retired American ambassador wasn’t fazed by chaos. He’d been in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Phnom Penh as it was falling to the Khmer Rouge and Mogadishu in the throes of Somalia’s civil war. Once he received his Halliburton-issued Chevrolet Suburban, he disregarded security edicts and drove around Baghdad without a military escort. His mission, as he put it, “was to listen to the Iraqis and work with them.”He left after two months, disgusted and disillusioned…
Desperate for new approaches to stifle the persistent Sunni insurgency and Shiite death squads that are jointly pushing the country toward an all-out civil war, the White House made a striking about-face last week, embracing strategies and people it once opposed or cast aside. [Link]
Now that the Neocons and “swamp drainers” have been discredited, it is time for the pragmatic adults to clean up their mess. These are the same pragmatic adults who were accused of not understanding the real threat of terrorism by the idealogues who lost their reason to fear, post 9/11. Part of the new plan for Baghdad is what the people worth listening to were saying all along. That is what makes the present bloodshed even harder to witness:
The plan unveiled by Bush last week calls for many people who lost their jobs under Bremer’s de-Baathification decree to be rehired. It calls for more Sunnis, who were marginalized under the CPA, to be brought into the government. It calls for state-owned factories to be reopened. It calls for more reconstruction personnel to be stationed outside the Green Zone. It calls for a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasizes providing security to the civilian population over transferring responsibility to local military forces.
Carney believes such measures could have been effective three years ago. Today, he worries they will be too little, too late. [Link]