I don’t need to tell y’all that brown people are taking over the world. Hell, desis been taking over for a minute now. One place where you would have thought this would be apparent is here in New York City, where our people are running things across the board, from academia to media to cinema to art to finance to medicine to law to activism to philanthropy to — oh, yeah, fruit vendors and taxi cab drivers (but we do not speak of these). And yet, there remains a class of benighted New Yorkers who have yet to recognize the ever-browning brownitude in which they bathe.

Who are these poor souls? Why, they’re the readers of the New York Observer: the pink-papered weekly with the highbrow preoccupations and the arch headlines and the Upper West Side noblesse oblige; the original fount of the Candace Bushnell column that begat Sex and the City; the paper that crows to advertisers that it “delivers the top of the market: a well-educated, affluent audience of highly influential consumers.” Indeed, according to the sales kit, median household income among Observer subscribers is $162,500; median net worth is $1,546,200; the average numbers are much higher.

Well, in what must be confirmation that we have finally arrived, this lofty set has been officially advised of our existence as of the current issue of the Observer, which features a series of short profiles penned by Nicholas Boston, under the (highly original!) title “India, Inc.” The reduction to India of a group that actually mixes FOBs (or whatever we’re calling them now), ABDs, 1.5s, and people of Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani and even half-Dutch origin is but one of the various conflations that y’all sensitive types might bridle at but that, let’s face it, shouldn’t really matter all that much given that we all look the same.

Anyway, now that we exist, at least as some kind of highly literate brown blob, we also need a name. What would it be? Desicrats? Macacarati? No! We are… the Bollypolitans! “A Bollypolitan elite is the newest creative class to kick into New York with art, fashion, literature,” the subtitle announces. And in the first sentence we meet our leader:

In 2000, the Indian-American Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with The Interpreter of Maladies, making her the first South Asian—and, at 33, among the youngest of any ethnicity—to be named in that category. She appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, wearing crimson, her hair gelled back into a chignon.

Charlie Rose! Crimson! Chignons! Shit, this desi thing must be for real. Indeed:

Ever since then, twenty- and thirtysomethings of South Asian descent—that would be Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan—have emerged in a very public way on New York’s cultural stage, and we’re not talkin’ Kaavya Viswanathan. Art centers have been chartered, dance ensembles formed, fashion companies founded—and many more books, both fiction and nonfiction, written and published. Herewith, some names to learn.

So, quick: If you had to pick 12 desis-you-need-to-know in the New York “creative class” (and don’t pick Cicatrix or myself, that would be too easy :P), who would you choose? You can compare your results with Mr. Boston’s incredible advanced sociological sampling analysis here. Discuss! Continue reading →

In the very interesting New York Times article that Naina discusses below, about relations between African-American and immigrant Muslims in the city, virtually all the immigrant voices are desi and Arab, with scarcely a mention of the city’s growing African Muslim community from countries like Senegal, Guinee, Ivory Coast and Mali. The lack of mention felt a bit odd coming in an article published at the very same time that the city was reeling from a major tragedy that put West African Muslims front and center in local news.

As many of you know there was an accidental fire in a house in the Bronx last Wednesday night that killed ten people, nine of them children, all from an extended family from Mali. Excluding 9/11, it’s the greatest loss of life in such an event in the city since the nightclub fire in 1990 that decimated another immigrant group, the Garifuna. There has been quite an outpouring of support in the city, from public officials, churches, synagogues, and businesses: for instance, the New York Yankees are covering expenses for the five victims who have been buried in the U.S., while Air France was covering repatriation of the five other bodies to Mali.

I’ve spent much of the past few days covering the story for work, and attended community gatherings in the Bronx and Harlem over the weekend and also the funeral on Monday, at the Islamic Cultural Center on East 166th St. in the Bronx that has served as the mourning and family gathering headquarters since the fire. On Monday afternoon several thousand people packed the low, storefront-ish masjid and the streets outside to mourn and pray as the eight hearses pulled up and the ten small, plain wood caskets were unloaded for a brief service. The crowd was mostly West African but there were Latino and African-American people present too, along with a host of public officials. Mali’s foreign minister flew in on Saturday, and ambassadors from other African countries paid respects as well.

It’s a sidebar to the main story, but there was a desi angle here that really struck me. There is a lot of talk in situations like these about the affected community coming together in solidarity, which they very much have — in a moving, almost beautiful way. And there is also much talk about the city uniting, “ordinary New Yorkers” pitching in money and other support, and all of this too is very much true. What can get a little lost in the narrative is how much inter-immigrant solidarity we also witness at times like these. Continue reading →

Over the last three years SM has slowly gained in readership, and other news sources and blogs often link to us. These links are one part of the formula that search engines like Google use to rank pages for relevance. That means that very often when you search for a desi related story, celebrity, etc., you’ll end up here at our humble site. Sometimes the people we write about love that fact! It is free publicity for them from a source whose intelligent (yes you!) readership they $value$. Other times we get celebrities threatening to sue us for embarrassing them (see our FAQ as to how we respond to those emails). I won’t mention which celebrities save one. Indian born fashion designer, Anand Jon.

Almost two years ago our Anna, a fan of ANTM, mentioned him in a blog post. In fact, she quoted from an article over at Nirali Magazine (link is broken) in which former ANTM contestant Julie Ann Titus made some rather disparaging comments about Mr. Jon. Here is a quote by Ms. Titus from Anna’s post:

I respect him as a fashion designer. But he was very, very rude to some of the girls. He seemed so boring to me. I asked him what part of India he was from, and he asked me, what part of India are you from? So I said I’m from Kerala, and he looked at me kind of crazy. He’s Malayalee , too. He asked me if I knew any Malayalam, and I said I only knew the bad words. Then he says, “Shouldn’t you be serving us or something?” [Titus and the other cast members had to serve four of the girls who won that week’s model challenge.] So I walked away, cursing at him in Malayalam. He said, “Oh, so now you know it?” And he smelled bad. The girls looked at me and were like, are all Indian guys like this? And I was like, nope, just this fool right here. Later, my parents told me that they know him through family friends.

Well, it turns out that one of the top Google hits on “Anand Jon” was our site…describing how he smells bad. “Jon,” or someone pretending to be him emailed us about a year ago, begging that Anna’s post be deleted. His mother had seen it and people were unfairly talking smack about his sister as well. Anna would have none of it. If a celebrity can’t take a little bad press then they shouldn’t be celebrities Anna gently (and correctly) explained to me. Always trying to be a good boy however, I told Anand that we would not delete Anna’s post but I would delete some of the especially nasty comments that followed the post, corroborating that he did in fact smell (allegedly). Partly as a joke however, I told him that he had to prove he was the real Anand Jon and not a prankster. “How,” Jon asked. Well, I once saw a movie starring Russell Crowe as an ex-SAS soldier whose new job was to become a hostage/ransom negotiator, and if need be, a hostage rescuer. When a person is kidnapped the first thing you do is to ask the kidnappers for “Proof of Life.” Typically, this is a picture of the victim holding the day’s newspaper. That way you know he/she is still alive. Since I’ve always thought of myself as a bit Russell Crowe-ish (Gladiator not Insider), I asked Jon for very specific “Proof of Life,” before I would delete the nasty comments. See below:

Now, I promised Jon that I wouldn’t post this picture of him reading his favorite website, and I know I will burn in the fiery pits of Mt. Doom for this. But…we here at SM can confidently say that allegedly smelling bad is no longer the worst of Mr. Jon’s problems. See after the jump.

Continue reading →