Pac Picks Manny

Pacman's brown lawyer.JPG

I work with twenty people, eighteen of whom are men; recently, I’ve been privy to outrage and debate regarding the following scandal (when I’m not ignoring boasts regarding bracketology, that is). I didn’t realize that there was a Sepia angle to the Adam “Pacman” Jones controversy until Anantha kindly alerted us to it, earlier today. I’ll get to that, but first, let’s catch up other non-ESPN-addicts with what the hell I’m going on about:

It’s Feb. 19 in Vegas and, two miles from The Strip at a club called Minxx, the three-day party that is the NBA All-Star Weekend is about to end.
With gunfire.
According to witnesses, Adam Bernard “Pacman” Jones sits in a VIP booth with seven acquaintances, six of them women, the other his bodyguard. They’re drinking Dom Perignon champagne and Patron tequila, which goes for $600 a bottle. Pacman watches as Cornell Haynes Jr. — America knows him as the rapper Nelly — and music producer Jermaine Dupri (whose girlfriend is Janet Jackson) “make it rain” dollar bills for several songs. Jones, the Tennessee Titans cornerback who considers himself a major player, wants a piece of their action. Pacman asks an employee to convert $3,400 in larger bills into smaller denominations and approaches the stage. Wide-eyed, almost childlike, he showers fists full of dollars on the dancers.
What happened next, in the context of the law, might not be determined for months, if ever. But when the gunshots ended, a security guard, a former WWF wrestler named Tommy Urbanski, was on the ground with his spinal cord shattered by a bullet. Two others, another bouncer and a female patron, were also shot.

To be clear, Las Vegas police consider Jones a WITNESS, not a person of interest; the trouble-magnet of an athlete claims he’s not the one. The club owner says he made threats and knows the gunman, who has yet to be found. But just in case…

Even though he hasn’t been charged, Jones hired an attorney, Manny Arora, from the same Atlanta-based law firm that defended Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis on charges of murder and aggravated assault in 2000.

The entire ESPN article is a fascinating read and I say that as someone who is almost entirely bored by sports (unless it’s something else fascinating…like cricket). I’m not saying I have any sympathy for Pacman (who got his nick because of the enthusiastic way he housed bottles of milk when he was a wee thing) or the devil for that matter, but after reading a backstory like this:

Misfortune is something that has touched Jones early, and often. His father, Adam, was shot in the back of the head and died when Pacman was 5. His mother, Deborah, spent three years in prison. An uncle died from a knife wound. He’s seen some of his peers die. He was raised chiefly by his grandmother, Christine Jones, and she died of cancer after he graduated from high school.

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Paging Betty Ford

In high school I had a social studies teacher who was a HinJew. He was an old hippy who found eastern religion, and through that became more of an observant Jew (no, it doesn’t make total sense, but that’s how it was). I was just thinking that Mr. Steinfink would have been very busy last weekend with both Holi and Purim falling at the same time.

It’s funny how similar the two events are. They’re both great holidays for kids — you get to throw colored powder on people, dress up, and make noise — but they also involve the sanctioned or encouraged use of mind altering substances as well. A little something for for all ages, I guess.

Holi
Purim
Fun for kids You get to throw colored powder and water at people, no matter how important or old You get to use loud noisemakers (greggars), dress up in costumes, and eat pastries (homentashn)
Adult fun Drink marijuana in thandai, eat pot mithai It’s a mitzvah to drink wine until you can no longer tell the difference between the phrase “Cursed is Haman” and “Blessed is Mordechai”
Bonfires Holika burned in effigy (Traditionally) Haman burned in effigy
Somewhat bloody theological justification The Asura, Hiranyakashipu, tries to burn his own son, Prahlad, alive, but instead incinerates his sister, Holika. The vizier, Haman, plots a genocide against the Jews. The Queen, Esther, saves the Jews and instead they get to destroy their enemies.
How religious is it? There are different theological explanations for the event, so I would guess not very. The book of Esther is the only book in the Hebrew Bible that doesn’t mention G-d.

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On Reasons for Holi

The LA Times has an article on a Holi festival that took place in southern California last weekend:

About 150 people from Southern California gathered Saturday at Arcadia Park to celebrate Holi — the Pan-Indian “festival of colors,” a holiday celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs and some Muslims that rejoices in the coming of spring and the triumph of good over evil. It is considered a major Hindu festival.

According to whom? I’m a Southie, and as far as I know, playfully throwing water balloons and colored powder at one another isn’t really our thing.

The reporter also gives a run-down on the history of Holi:

One version of the tale tells of Prehlad’s father, Hiranyakshipu, an evil man who wanted Prehlad to worship him, not the Hindu god Vishnu. After many attempts to change his son’s mind, Hiranyakshipu decides to burn him to death, and his aunt, Holika, is to help. In the end, Holika is burned to death and Prehlad is saved.

A woman is burned alive to save her nephew — what a wonderful reason to celebrate!

Another story is about the Hindu god Krishna, who is said to have lived 5,000 years ago. He enjoyed dalliances with the milkmaids, especially Radha. On Holi, Krishna asked his mother why his skin was darker than Radha’s. His mother told him to rub paint on her. She retaliated and eventually, all the villagers joined in. Since then, Holi has also been celebrated with colors.

I always thought Holi had little religious significance and had more to do with celebrating the beginning of spring and the harvest. But maybe that’s just the Chicago grad in me talking. In any case, Professor Vinay Lal of UCLA has his explanation of Holi:

Holi is something anybody can take part in because you do not need anything, just water and color. You can go to the home of an upper-caste person and throw water at them and rub color on them. But the following day, everything reverts back to normal.

So it’s really all about having a day to whoop some upper-caste ass. On a lighter note, the last part of the article made me smile:

In the United States, celebrants said it was a good day to take time off from hectic days of work, relax with friends and family and to renew friendships. “If you are on bad terms with someone, you don’t need to speak words to them,” said Sonia Anand, 35, of Arcadia. “Sometimes the words hold you back, and all you need is some color and a hug.”

Sounds more like the Holi I know. Continue reading

Cut That Ghee! Cut That Ghee!

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I am not, I repeat not, calling him a ho. Hey, $200,000 to me sounds like a perfectly fair price to make an appearance at a Sweet Sixteen birthday party. Even when you’re already on a $100 million contract with a $34 million guaranteed signing bonus. Yeah, yeah, I know, maybe the dough wasn’t that much, and maybe it all went to charity, or something. But that gets us to the more important question: Who the hell spends that kind of money on their daughter’s 16th birthday party? And if Peyton cost two hundred grand, what was the total bill for the event considering that Cedric the Entertainer and Mallika Sherawat were apparently also in the house?

Either way, the whole thing was lampooned yesterday on both PTI and ATH on ESPN; you can find the video by digging around here. The consensus view was: Tacky. Offer your own thoughts on the matter here, or if you prefer a more down and dirty environment, check out the comment threads at Deadspin (which broke this story) or AOL Sports, where the proportion of terrorist and camel jokes is actually refreshingly low. Continue reading

Mature Macaca Molested Montessori Minor, Maybe

It’s only because Abhi doesn’t pay us I don’t have the time that I haven’t taken myself down to Manhattan Supreme Court to check out on your behalf, gentle reader, the ongoing circus that is generating press clips of this nature:

A city cop who testified he was seduced at age 13 by his East Side Montessori school principal suffered a figurative beating by the same headmistress in court yesterday. …

“Did that involve any noise?” Shargel asked. “Noises that are often attendant to the act of making love?” The cop answered, “The TV would be on loud.”

Backstory and Desi Angle (TM): Well, you see, the Montessori school principal in question is desi. Name of Lina Sinha, age 40. The alleged events took place about ten years ago. It seems something went down between the two, but just what, and how illegal, and whether it can be proved, is up in the air. He says she raped him when he was underage. She says they had an affair after he turned 17, which ended badly; that she had accused him of beating her and he, fearing this would lose him his job with the NYPD, turned around and accused her of rape.

Additional elements of note: Steven Soderbergh was almost a juror in the case. Too bad he didn’t make the final cut – there’s sex here for sure, and lies somewhere, and all we need is the videotape. Second element of note: Sinha’s attorney is Gerald Shargel, who is best known for defending mobsters. Damn! Maybe I will make it down to the court after all. The whole scene sounds classic.

Get your fix with these stories from the first day of the trial last week (Daily News flava; New York Post flava with photo of Sinha — go on, you know you want to; New York Times flava), and these updates. Looks like Shargel’s scoring some points, which is why he gets paid the big bucks. We’ll try and keep an eye on this tawdriness for you as the trial continues. Continue reading

Virginia is for Lovers and Indians

Guess what? Virginia ain’t just for lovers no more. It is also for Indian Americans. Well, at least on January 26th of every year:

Virginia will celebrate January 26 as Indian-American Day in recognition of the community’s contribution to the State.

A legislation to this effect was recently passed by its legislature.

Over the past year, I have come to realize how much the Indian-American community contributes to the Commonwealth. In appreciation of their efforts and all they have done for the Commonwealth and its people, it is my pleasure to announce the creation of Indian-American Day in Virginia,” Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling said. [Link]

Let me rephrase that quote by Bolling so that it is slightly more honest. “Over the past year, I have come to realize that you shouldn’t refer to brown people as Macacas but rather, you should make dosas with them.”

Although this is bound to upset some of our more sensitive readers, I do wish they had been more inclusive and called it “Macaca-American Day” instead. The way I see it, we have nearly 10 months to plan. How are we going to celebrate our own day?

“The face of Virginia is changing and the immigrant community is a powerful force in urban and suburban Virginia,” Bolling said, adding that he wanted to do everything he could to reach out to the immigrant community and build a ‘better’ Virginia.

“During my campaign for Lieutenant Governor I made a promise to the Indian-American community. I promised to do my best to develop closer ties with them and involve them more in the leadership of Virginia,” he said. [Link]
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Comparing “Heroes” to “Midnight’s Children”

While we’re on the subject of television, am I the first person to think of shows like Lost and Heroes as the television equivalent of “magic realism” in the novel? These shows have elements of science fiction and fantasy, but remain grounded in realistic narration, human relationships, and a world that more or less resembles our own (with certain quiet variations). As a result, they can achieve mainstream respectability and broad popularity, while true Sci-Fi remains somewhat of a smaller, niche market — the “outer space” of basic cable, if you will.

This is going to sound blasphemous, but Heroes in particular actually reminds me a little of Midnight’s Children in some ways. Remember this delightful passage from Rushdie’s novel:

From Kerala, a boy who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and re-emerging through any surface in the land–through lakes, and (with greater difficulty), the polished bodies of automobiles . . . and a Goanese girl with the gift of multiplying fish . . . and children with powers of transformation: a werewolf from the Nilgiri hills, and from the great watershed of the Vindhvas, a boy who could increase or reduce his size at will, and had already (mischievously) been the cause of wild panic and rumors of the return of Giants . . . from Kashmir, there was a blue-eyed child of whose sex I was never certain, since by immersing herself in water he (or she) could alter it as she (or he) pleased. Some of us called this child Narada, others Markandaya, depending on which old fairy story of sexual change we had heard . . . near Jalna in the heart of the parched Deccan I found a water-divining youth, and at Budge-Budge outside of Calcutta a sharp-tongued girl whose words already had the power of inflicting physical wounds, so that after a few adults had found themselves bleeding freely as a result from some barb flung casually from her lips, they decided to lock her up in a bamboo cage and float her off down the Ganges to the Sunderbans jungles (which are the rightful home of monsters and phantasms); but nobody dared approach her, and she moved through the town surrounded by a vacuum of fear; nobody had the courage to deny her food. There was a boy who could eat metal and a girl whose fingers were so green that she could grow prize aubergines in the Thar desert; and more and more…

Ah, Rushdie: the old passages don’t disappoint. Of course, the different magical powers don’t map precisely to the characters in Heroes, but there are certain overlaps:

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Posted in TV

Filmiholic Interviews Kal Penn; They Discuss This Here Blog

Wow, go Filmiholic — this week she has interviews with both Kal Penn and Jhumpa Lahiri coinciding with the imminent release of The Namesake.

She and Kal Pann actually discuss Sepia Mutiny in Part 1 of their interview, with regards to the SM debate over desis playing terrorists in hollywood, and specifically Kal Penn’s role as a terrorist in a recent episode of 24. I gather he’s sympathetic to the fact that people are having a discussion, but not entirely sympathetic to the “blogging = people yakking at each other endlessly” part:

The point that I was trying to make was that I’m glad that people are discussing it, why I’m glad that people are getting pissed off about it is that I think that one of the things that’s happened since September 11 is we feel like we don’t have control over our representatives in government, especially as people of color, and I think it’s important to take that back.

It’s important to write letters to your Senator, your Congressman, to the guys who are actually voting on the issues that come up fictitiously on 24. The things that happen on 24 are so far-fetched, but there’s an under layer of reality to them that applies to things like the Patriot Act and racial profiling.

These are things that I hope people don’t just blog on Sepia Mutiny and whine their asses off, I hope that they take that a step further and take the passions they explain in those blogs and send a letter to Hillary Clinton, send a letter to whoever your usual rep is and it does have a remarkable effect when you do it as voting block and I hope that it motivates people to take that a step further. (link)

(A little ouch there… two quick responses: first, it should be pointed out that in several instances — Power 99 and Hot 97 come to mind — SM has done a bit more than whine. Second, just watch what we do on the 2008 elections, mofo!)

Anyway, the question stands: on the question of whether to do something like “Van Wilder,” I have to admit I have no idea what I would do in his shoes — how can one make the best out of a rather limited array of options for an Indian-American actor? Especially several years ago, before we had Harold and Kumar, Lost, E.R., and Heroes.

Still, as a counterpoint, I would encourage people to read the recent New Yorker profile of Joel Surnow, the guy behind 24. I was especially disturbed about Surnow’s blithe embrace of the use of torture in the show, contrary to American law and all existing human rights conventions. Once one knows that justifying torture is a pattern in the show — or, put more forcefully, a specific ideology it is promoting — it might be easier to see where to draw the line. Continue reading

Fencing Out The Other

The ever-interesting Stratpage has a summary of the next generation of Berlin Walls’ being built all over the world.

Good Fences = Good Neighbors

Of course, unlike the last go around, these walls revert to old skool role of keeping undesirables out rather than locking your citizenry in –

March 4, 2007: There a lot of large scale barrier systems going up in the world…

…Israel is building a 700 kilometers barrier between itself and the Palestinian West Bank.

…Pakistan is building a barrier along its 2,400 kilometer border with Afghanistan .

…Kuwait is upgrading its 215 kilometers of barrier along its Iraq border.

…Spain is building barriers around its two enclaves in Morocco

And so on. But the biggest wall of them all is actually being built by India –

India is building a 4,000 kilometer barrier along its border with Bangladesh. Various Indian rebel groups have been using bases in Bangladesh, and the local government has been reluctant to shut them down. That’s partly because of the large number of illegal migrants moving from Bangladesh to India.

For comparison, the oft-talked about, but never really implemented, US-Mexico border fence would be a full 1000km shorter than India’s Great Wall . And appropriately, the debate surrounding India’s wall echoes familiar arguments and issues from south of the US border.

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Inside Dharavi

Last year I did a post on a poverty tourism experiment happening in Delhi. In both my own assessment and in the comments, opinion on the program was mixed: one the one hand, some people are offended by this concept, as it smacks of voyeurism. Others (like Bong Breaker) pointed out that the people who run these tours put money back into charities that support the community, and perhaps the people who go on these tours could benefit by added awareness and sensitivity. And John Thompson, who founded Salaam Baalak Trust, actually chimed in with his own defense of the program.

Now the Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article on another poverty tourism program happening in Dharavi, Mumbai. John Lancaster acknowledges the controvery over Reality Tours and Travel, but also goes beyond it, to tell us what he learned from the tour itself. Some of what he has to say is surprising:

Dharavi stretched before us like a vast junkyard, a hodgepodge of brick and concrete tenements roofed with corrugated metal sheets that gleamed dully in the sunshine. Poojari gave us a moment to take it all in. “We’ll show you the positive side of a slum,” he declared.

In the face of such squalor, his words seemed jarring. But Dharavi’s industriousness is well documented. Its businesses manufacture a variety of products—plastics, pottery, bluejeans, leather goods—and generate an estimated $665 million in annual revenue. In other words, Dharavi is not just a slum, it is also a node on the global economy.

Dharavi’s industries are arranged geographically, like medieval guilds, and the first alley we visited belonged to recyclers. In one small “godown” (as warehouses are known on the subcontinent), men were disassembling old computer keyboards. In another, men smeared from head to toe in blue ink stripped the casings from used ballpoint pens so they could be melted down and recycled. A few doors down, workers used heavy chains to knock the residue from steel drums that had once contained polyester resin. Poojari told us that some of Dharavi’s empty plastic bottles come from as far away as the United Kingdom. “People from a rich family, when they drink from a plastic bottle, they don’t know what happens to it afterwards,” he said. “Here, you see.” (link)

And it continues in that vein: Dharavi as a hive of light industrial activity. He acknowledges the smell, the open sewage, and the crampedness, but he doesn’t dwell on those things so much. And he ends with a telling reflection:

No one gave us a second glance, and I had to wonder about the motives of those in the Indian media and elsewhere who claimed on behalf of the Dharavi residents to be offended by the tours. Surely their ire could have been better targeted at the municipal authorities who had failed to provide the community with basic sanitation. I wondered whether the critics weren’t simply embarrassed by the slum’s glaring poverty—an image at odds with the country’s efforts to rebrand itself as a big software park. In any case, it seemed to me that the purpose of the tour was not to generate pity, but understanding. That’s not to say that it made me an expert—I was only there a few hours, after all. Were the people I saw in Dharavi the victims of globalization, or its beneficiaries? I still don’t know. But at least the question had been raised in my mind.(link)

Does this article change your opinion of “poorism,” as poverty tourism is sometimes called? Or is Lancaster’s account of a few hours spent in Dharavi too “sanitized” to be of value? Continue reading

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