659 thoughts on “Bobby Makes History”

1. 435 · HMF He has a better chance of winning the Police Benevolence Ballet Competition than he does a VP spot. The executive branch is sealed off, still white male. We can elect a martian governor, and still the executive branch’ll be sealed off.

   Wanna bet?

2. The executive branch is sealed off, still white male. We can elect a martian governor, and still the executive branch’ll be sealed off.

3. I hear conflicting commentary on taxes here – Rich have hot shot accountants and really do not pay taxes

   If they do not, then how would a tax cut benefit them. How is that the top 50% wage earners pay 97% of taxes according to data released by IRS (Top 5% pay 54% in 2005). Even if they hide their money, they still pay most of the taxes. The bottom 50% is paying a tiny bit of the taxes, so you can’t give them much of a tax cut by definition. Yet these are the people to whom the Democrats claim to want to give tax cuts.

   • Rich get richer by tax cut

   So do you want everyone to get poorer? The alternative has never worked in history, but its better than rich getting richer? The tax revenues almost always increase in the long run when taxes are cut..and that comes partly from people getting off the welfare rolls. By raising taxes and instituting mandatory health care cost on employers, you stifle small business that employ majority of population in the US. Small business is the engine that drives the economy. You want small business to expand and become bigger businesses and employ more people. Most small businessmen are Republican…and that says almost as much as the fact that most welfare recipients are Democrats.

4. think Clarence Thomas is just a great example of someone who has a) discretely benefitted from specific policies designed to address systemic disadvantage and discrimination, yet b) actively works to dismantle these same programs

   i was given prefernce once because i’m a man. so i feel morally obligated to oppose the ’64 civil rights act

5. I guess Bobby could never join Dumbledore’s army huh?…given recent revelations

6. I guess Bobby could never join Dumbledore’s army huh?…given recent revelations

   wonder what tolkien was thinking about that other old guy with a white beard, gandalf.

   seriously, i found her “outing” him completely ridiculous, because i think it is a real stretch given her description in the books. so he idolized a talented friend, and never married? of course, he must be gay! (even though his office was clearly always so messy).

7. Vic, I don’t deny that the rich pay the greatest market share of taxes. I just said that they don’t pay out as much as one would expect. It’s also not a surprise that the top 50% of wage earners pay 97% of taxes since that includes a hefty share of people that, at least in high-priced coastal regions, would be considered “middle to upper-middle” class. It depends on what you believe taxes ought to do — for many voters taxes are a means of wealth redistribution. Others feel this is inappropriate and that taxes should only account for basic infrastructural protections (e.g. defense). That’s just a philosophical difference, and it also guides how you view how the game is set up. I could be wrong, but I think there would be less grumbling about the benefits accrued by top $$$-holders if the wealth gap wasn’t widening.

   Back to taxes — the last round of tax cuts was intended to stimulate economic growth (simultaneously digging into the government’s revenue base). There’s a lot of argument over whether or not this actually happened because so many people applied their tax cut to paying down personal debt. Effectively, it was not reinvested in productive enterprises (something very similar happened during the Great Depression). Perhaps a tax cut would not have been problematic had our current President also refrained from increasing the government payroll and running up deficits he could not pay for. At a macro-level, the relevant questions, in my opinion, are: “How does tax revenue, at the margin, increase overall growth via spending on specific programs? (does it at all? does it perhaps mitigate costs, which could also be seen as a net benefit?) Is this increased growth greater than or comparable to the opportunity cost of how that revenue would have been otherwise spent? Are there moral or philosophical concerns unrelated to growth that drive this decision instead?”

   Ok, this is getting off topic, although I’m happy to discuss more if folks like via email instead 🙂

8. 457 · Camille It depends on what you believe taxes ought to do — for many voters taxes are a means of wealth redistribution.

   If you want to be really “pink” (in the lefty sense), you can say taxes are a means of “distribution”–the “re-” suggests you take market outcomes at least somewhat seriously, which isn’t really necessary.

9. Manju: article dated Jan 03, 2004 (over 2 months ahead of where we are now for the ’08 election)

   pulled quote from the article: “Now former Vermont Governor Howard Dean leads the eight other Democrats by every measure that matters (at least until people start voting): in polls, money, organization and enthusiasm”

   Manju: article dated Jan 20, 2004, (after strenuous and complex mathematical analysis, that’s only, 17 days after)

   Conclusion: frontrunners at this point don’t mean sh*t.

10. The overarching theme I’ve noticed, which I have been very troubled by, is that there seems to be some unwritten set of guidelines for who is a “real” desi and no one is allowed to deviate from them. No one is allowed to change their faith (they are only allowed to reject it), no one is allowed to be a conservative, no one is allowed to give their kids “western” or Americanized names. Well, I think all of that is ridiculous. Who are we to judge?

    Perhaps we can all agree on some things and distinguish between some others?

    First, the notion that there can or should be a litmus test for who is authentically a “real” desi and who isn’t is everything Amardeep, Anna, and others say that it is — corrosive, self-destructive, misguided, unhelpful. And at the end of the day perhaps meaningless — there’s too much diversity among Indian Americans for that even to be a meaningful endeavor, and it’s particularly unseemly and troubling when it comes to issues like religion, family, and what a person’s name or nickname is or isn’t. So especially in that context, I don’t think that it gets any of us very far — and probably sets us back — to attack Jindal for his faith, his decision to convert, his nickname, and what he chooses to name his spawn. All of that seems rather besides the point in evaluating him as a public figure, and people who criticize him on that basis really do themselves no favors in advancing their own political beliefs.

    That said, there are a few distinctions that I think we should all step back and insist upon, even — and maybe especially — when conversations get overheated:

    1. I think we can and should distinguish between those kinds of attacks (for example, based on Jindal’s religion, names, and other modes of assimilation) and attempts to understand what his election means for other South Asian Americans — whether, for example, the ways in which he might be regarded by the electorate as more assimilated has a significant bearing on his electability. That seems a perfectly fair question to ask and think about, and it does bear upon the extent to which Jindal’s election, for example, really is significant for other would-be desi politicos or not. (Something that I don’t regard as an all-or-nothing proposition.) To ask that question and think about that question is not to attack him as inauthentically desi, but merely an attempt to understand what a particular phenomenon means for the rest of us, and how significant we should regard it to be. For example, tall people get elected at a higher rate than shorter people. If we have a conversation about that, it’s obviously not an attack on tall people — and by the same token, it’s not necessarily an attack on Jindal’s Christianity or his nickname to talk about whether those are advantages in his electability that others might not benefit from.

    2. I also think we can distinguish between attacking Jindal as supposedly inauthentically desi on account of his religion and criticizing particular political positions that are informed by those religious beliefs. Jindal himself, I am sure, would say that many of his political views are informed by his faith, but even if he didn’t, that isn’t an unfair question to ask and think about. To the extent that people disagree with those political views and are concerned by how extreme they are, I don’t think that it is then automatically fair to say that they are attacking him on the basis of his religion if they note — as many religious conservatives themselves do quite often — that those views seem to be informed by a particular set of religious beliefs. I’m not necessarily sure what one does with that realization once the observation is made, but nevertheless there does seem to be a difference there, and if we have any hope of civil discourse within our communities I think we need to try to insist upon that distinction more often than perhaps we do.

    That goes in two directions: critics of Jindal should not descend into attacking his religion, but at the same time, people who note the apparent relationship between his politics and his faith shouldn’t automatically be misconstrued as attacking him on the basis of his religion or positing some sort of litmus test of authenticity. That second move is equally problematic, and all too common. However, it’s the first problematic move that seems to get most of our attention. (This pathology is not, incidentally, something limited by any means to conversations about Bobby Jindal — witness, for example, the accusations that Senate Democrats were being anti-Catholic and anti-Latino when they opposed Miguel Estrada’s nomination to be a judge. Those accusations were pure manipulation in trying to paint those senators as being motivated by bigotry, for they were neither anti-Catholic nor anti-Latino, but simply anti-Miguel Estrada. Indeed, several of the senators opposing him were themselves Catholic.)

    1. Finally, I think it is completely possible, and completely fair, to ask questions about whether the positions and policies of any political figure — whether or not they are desi — are advancing or hurting the interests of Indian Americans or South Asian Americans, and to urge them to engage members of the community on that question. In saying that, I am not suggesting that there is a monolithic view of what that means, or that one set of views about the interests of people in the community is a marker of “authenticity” and another set of views is not. Obviously, if any of us hold views about that, we are likely to think that we are correct and others mistaken, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem by itself. But just because I may be inclined to criticize Jindal or somebody else as perhaps not acting in the best of interests of South Asians doesn’t mean that I’m suggesting that he’s a sellout or not legitimately desi. I may simply be arguing that he might not someone who is serving the community’s interests. Others may disagree, and there may be competing views about what the community’s interests are. But that only means that it is fair game to engage in dialogue about that question — not that I’m trying to dictate my own views upon others in the form of a litmus test, and it may be manipulation to suggest otherwise.

    Again, I think that’s a really important distinction to insist upon. I don’t think that means that every point of view is necessarily “valid,” in the anything-goes, relativistic postmodern sense that has been favored by some conservatives in recent years — there might be actual answers, for example, to the question of whether policy X serves interests A, B, and C in the community more or less than policies Y and Z. We might not all agree about that, but just because we disagree doesn’t mean that everyone is correct and valid — only that we might be engaged in dialogue for awhile. But I do think that people who disagree about what the community’s interests are should be able to have direct, open, and respectful conversations about that which don’t descend into one side accusing the other of being sellouts, and the other side responding that everyone who might disagree with them is accusing them of selling out and trying to create a racial litmus test.

    Neither of those extremes seems all that helpful — on both sides, they’re usually drive by emotion or the desire to score short term political points, but in the long run, I don’t think anyone gains very much from that. For a sad example of how ugly and destructive that dynamic can get we need look no further than the ugly back and forth between Clarence Thomas and his supporters, on the one hand, and some of Thomas’s critics, on the other. (Though not, as Thomas would sometimes have us believe, all of them — not everyone who criticizes Clarence Thomas is accusing him of being an “Uncle Tom.”) After a certain point, neither side in that ugly back and forth really deserves our support or defense, at least not in that particular fight; they’ve all lost their way to a considerable extent. I hope that we don’t lose ours.

11. pied piper, I agree with all of that, but why such a short post? you should learn to elaborate on your points a bit.

12. seriously, i found her “outing” him completely ridiculous”

    I remember watching a conference where a girl admitted to having a crush on snape...jk snapped at the fan (nicely) saying snape might look appealing but he was 'the wrong sort of man'....I dig her writing but I see serious depression in JK..she needs to up the Lithium for sho!
    

13. Are any of the Jindal-haters willing to confess to being, at least a tad, motivated by the attempt to appear “sophisticated”–i.e., thinking–well, the “natural” thing to do is to be happy–so, wait, I’ll be “cool” and dump on him….

14. Vic:

    If a desi is truly brilliant, he would be a Republican….

    Way to channel Ann Coulter, there.

    Lizzie (GEF), if you’re anywhere on this post, I think I understand where you were coming from on that Salon article you commented on a few weeks ago.

15. HMF — i know, i’m always getting accused of being too abrupt and concise. but 400+ comments later, i felt like i was below quota.

16. rob,

    First I want to be clear that I’m going to say this sincerely and without snark. I don’t presume to speak for everyone, but just because some of us disagree with you does not mean that we do this out of some personal insecurity that drives us to establish our internet “coolness” via a SM comment-thread. Do you bash on “lefty” issues that are “naturally agreeable” to “look cool”?

    Unrelated, is your underlying point in #458 that I’m a “pinko”? I don’t want to read anything into your comment that isn’t there.

17. Are any of the Jindal-haters willing to confess to being, at least a tad, motivated by the attempt to appear “sophisticated”–i.e., thinking–well, the “natural” thing to do is to be happy–so, wait, I’ll be “cool” and dump on him….

    rob, thanks for hitting the nail on the head. that explains why i felt the need to go out on saturday night, gorge myself on a kobe ribeyed steak, and drink myself to a stupor on a 1998 cheval blanc. of course, i then betrayed by nouveau richness by binging on a tub of breyer’s that i bought from the corner 7-11.

18. I think that BJ is a sellout – BIG TIME!!! 1. He claims that he informally changed his name to “bobby” from watching the brady bunch. Right…Do us desis here need to be reminded that the names “Bobby” and “monica” are very popular Indian names, especially in Northern India?
    2. What’s up with converting to Catholicism? I love Christianity, but not sellouts. Why didn’t he convert Baptism, Judaism, Moormonism, Pentecostal, bahai? He chose the easy way out, and a religion that’s anti-woman, anti-ManOfColor (i.e. there has never been an non-white pope), that just happens to be the majority religion in Louisiana.
    3. He believes that the alternative to evolution should be taught in schools (forget the name of this “theory”). 4. Against hate-crime legislation. 5. Very staunch supporter of this War with Iraq.

    I’m sure that he’d say anti-Indian things in a heart beat…heck, he’d probably say “What’s up with them darn brown people…Oh wait…I’m brown…heee heee”.

    On the other hand, I am convinced that he’s going to be very uncorrupt, very competitive, and that he’ll advance Louisiana a bit.

    And in the process of advancing Louisiana, he’ll advance the Indo-American’s cause, paradoxically.

19. He chose the easy way out, and a religion that’s anti-woman, anti-ManOfColor (i.e. there has never been an non-white pope), that just happens to be the majority religion in Louisiana.

    you’re stupid.

20. A N N A on October 22, 2007 05:18 PM · Direct link

    *****The overarching theme I’ve noticed, which I have been very troubled by, is that there seems to be some unwritten set of guidelines for who is a “real” desi and no one is allowed to deviate from them. No one is allowed to change their faith (they are only allowed to reject it), no one is allowed to be a conservative, no one is allowed to give their kids “western” or Americanized names. ********

    There is no problem when people change faith, give western names etc — But when all these factors merge in a rather focussed and goal oriented way which may not be in the desi’s interest — then that is a cause for concern.

    In this instance Bobby Jindal socially conservative, fundamentalist christian views now translated into a governor who has power to change or influence change towards his agenda which will ultimately percolates all they way down to the layman on the ground. As desis — we have to see whether this is beneficial for us or not. That is what it boils down to. Bobby Jindal the software engineer and his son Mark Jindal are of no interest to us, since they do not pose a threat to our lifestyle. But Bobby Jindal and his son with the Mark or Albert Jindal making active political decisions … is something to be concerned of.

21. But when all these factors merge in a rather focussed and goal oriented way which may not be in the desi’s interest

    bobby jindal changed is name when he was a little kid. he converted to catholicism as a teenager. granted, many kids are ambitious, but this is ridiculous! you’re confusing the issue, it may be that bobby jindal didn’t become bobby-the-catholic in the interests of his political career, rather, bobby jindal has a political career because he became bobby-the-catholic.

22. 466 · Camille Unrelated, is your underlying point in #458 that I’m a “pinko”?

    I just wanted to point out that one could occupy space even further to the left on taxes. A lot of us wingnuts are fond of callig leftists “pinkos”–it means (AFAIK) nothing more than lefty, but not a commie (those are “reds”). Sorry if I seemed to be saying anything other than light-hearted humor.

23. It’s fine, I just wanted to clarify and didn’t want to misread or overreact. I’ve only heard “pinko” used in a highly derogatory manner, hence the natural aversion on my part. Light-hearted humor duly noted. 🙂

24. popes by nationality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Popes_by_nationality

    1) there were north africans & syrians (not to mention palestinian jews).

    2) the overwhelming majority derive from the italian nobility for obvious historical reasons

    i know this is a pedantic off-thread point, but this is the second time someone has claimed that there were no non-white popes (an obvious artifact of the reality that a) for most of history catholic xtianity was mostly western eurpean b) the papacy was long the preserve of the italian nobility).

25. Rather than second guessing the the life journey of Bobby Jindal, here is a link.

    PS: The above link is from bloggers from Louisiana, and is within the context of their state politics, so pick and choose if that is what someone wants to wish. It does have links to original sources: writings and interviews by Bobby Jindal.

26. Is there a litmus tests for black/brownness? If a POC deviates from this now-repeatedly-alluded to, apparently-secret-but-unanimously-agreed-upon bill of ethnic credibility, this is the first name which is mentioned…next on the continuum: “Uncle Tom”. It’s kinda ugly. And it’s hurtful. That’s why Amardeep and a few other bloggers here in the bunker aren’t fans. The good professor even wrote a post about it:

    I don’t think there’s an epidemic of POCs inventing ‘Uncle Tom’ equivalents to silence POC writers/academics/opinion-producers who disagree with a largely-held platform/view, partly because those ‘dissident’ POCs don’t have enough pull/influence to appear on anybody’s radar. Rushdie had been treading the pro-war (lite) waters before the Iraq conflict began, and he’s nowhere near the lunacy of Martin Amis, so I don’t see where other POC commentators could gather grist for their ‘brown sahib’ mills.

    Jindal’s comment about the ‘only’ barriers to success does discount class/SES, which is what I found annoying. Rural and poor public school students face incredible institutional hurdles as their high-school education will include far fewer sparkly AP and IB courses which college really like to see–as opposed to forking hay, working at menial jobs to supplement family income and other things that poor folk do to survive. The rhetoric of ‘by thine bootstraps, thou will economically emancipate thine family” presupposes that any failures to achieve financial solvency lie solely in an absence of work-ethic, effort and determination–as the product of a single-parent, rural home, I can attest to the sheer stupidity of such a statement. (was it not the original conservative–turned–kinda liberal Glenn Loury who did the initial formulation of the concept of social capital–the connections necessary to move up?)

    It was certainly unfortunate that GoriWife chose to throw Thomas’ name in there but it is he, not anyone else, who quite plainly said that his admission into Yale was not justified by his achievements but his race–what conclusion are we to draw from that sentiment? he says that the Yale degree was devalued by the perception of affirmative-action bias but what exactly would his ideal scenario have been? That he went to a less prestigious law school, was not picked up by John Danforth, never caught the attention of Bush I and never became a Supreme Court Justice? What would his impact on society have been if he went into private practice?

27. ANNA, you “know” a Sikh with a non-desi name, too [me] 🙂

    I thought that was both a ‘white name’ and, with a little stretching, a homonym/homomorph of ‘Kamal’, as in (for example) Kamaljit or Kamaljot. Are you sure it wasn’t/isn’t ? 🙂 The way someone might spell themselves ‘Neil’ or Neal or Neale when the same name in India would be ‘Neel’. Anyway, don’t mean this to be a threadjack on names.

    pied piper good post at 460.

    On the kid’s names thing, btw, ‘Slade’ is so off-the-top that it would be too much pcness not to at least point that out. That has nothing to do with religion, it’s just questionable judgement, especially if you’ve taken to calling yourself Bobby when your parents thought ‘Piyush’ was good enough.

28. 473 · Camille I’ve only heard “pinko” used in a highly derogatory manner, hence the natural aversion on my part. Light-hearted humor duly noted. 🙂

    Actually, wikipedia says it is “derogatory”–though it does mean non-commie leftist. Huh, learn something new every day. I will refrain from using it in future, (in off-line contexts as well). Thx. for being a good sport, though, and again, sorry.

29. ANNA, you “know” a Sikh with a non-desi name, too [me] 🙂

    There is a difference between opting for a name whatever it is, and actually taking the trouble to change your Indian name to a Western name. Also, I think with Bobby, it’s more than the name change itself that bothers people(there are other Indians who change names that dont get this flak) but a trend that kind of gives warning signals to people. The name change, the religion change, the intentional minimizing of the Indian supporters visibility a few years ago. The guy, from what I heard, was as ambitious as Reeese Witherspoon in the movie Election.

    Anyway, as much as I disagree with right winger fundamentalists, I am optimistic he will be an improvement over all the sorry ass governors this state has had in the past.

30. 467 · dravidian lurker rob, thanks for hitting the nail on the head. that explains why i felt the need to go out on saturday night, gorge myself on a kobe ribeyed steak, and drink myself to a stupor on a 1998 cheval blanc.

    Thx.–me too, though I had a Chateau Angelus 2002 bordeaux.

31. I thought that was both a ‘white name’ and, with a little stretching, a homonym/homomorph of ‘Kamal’, as in (for example) Kamaljit or Kamaljot. Are you sure it wasn’t/isn’t ? 🙂

    It actually isn’t at all related to “Kamal” (although there is a funny family story in which my dad and his friend had an argument over whether or not my dad has named his firstborn “Kamli”). My parents couldn’t agree on what to name me — my mom lobbied for “Khalis” and my dad for “Karishma.” My dad thought my mom’s choice was antiquated, my mom thought his was too “common.” So they compromised by letting my mom take her preferred name, translate it into French (her foreign language in college) and ended up with Camille. My mom says a driving factor was whether or not I would have a cute nickname (I kid you not). It also wasn’t an assimilationist move — both my sibs (younger) have very traditional Sikh-Punjabi names.

32. Hari – “If I recall, Rafiq Zakaria was to the left of even Nehru. Of course, at the time, Nehru’s economic policies (which were not nearly as bad as critics today will have one believe) were quite Centrist.”

    Zakaria, who was an Indira Gandhi man [not Nehru] was a secularist in name only. Indeed, he was a staunch champion of Islam, and has authored several books praised Islamic values and the virtues of Prophet Muhammad. Some [myself included] consider him a closet fundamentalist, for various reasons, but mostly because, he,in a disgusting personal attack said that, ex-President Kalam was not a true Muslim, because he read and respected the Bhagvad Gita and did not observe Ramzan. Zakaria also demanded Kalam’s ex-communication from the one “true faith”.

    So, No, he definitely was not to the “left of Nehru” or even to the left of the commenters on Sepia.

    And, the most important reason for his progeny’s success is very close connection to the first family of India, naked opportunism, and in Fareed’s case, picking mentors like, Kissinger and Huntington, and, above all, being willing to sell out his principles to the powerful. This does not mean that they are not smart, but no more than people like, Vinod Khosla, Tunku Vardarajan, Ramesh Ponurru, Vikram Pandit, Vikram Gandhi..and thousands of other Indians who are in the U.S., and who, btw, were not born with a silver ladle in their mouth.

    ps. like somebody else on this forum asked, why does zakria get a pass, from the desi intellectual set, on his iraq war support and proximity to the establishment?

33. I think Fareed is a “sometime-chairman” of the Party of the Right, which is about as right-wing an organization as you’ll find on a US campus, & has a lot of desis in it–it has a nice combination of “trads” & libertarians.

34. Well, member at least, & Pres. of Political Union.

35. Perhaps one reason for the anger against Jindal (for being “white”-ish) is that some of the choices he made (e.g. conversion, choosing a name more easily pronounced by Americans, etc) were the exact decisions that those who are angry with him did not make, but could have as it would have made living in the US easier for them. So, they feel they’ve borne the burden of remaining true to their “brown”-ness, while he hasn’t. Does this resonate with anybody?

    I’m guessing this is not well-recognized by the anti-Jindalites here (except those who are anti him for his politics).

    Also, one reason why we haven’t seen a South Asian become governor/US Senator/etc earlier, even though there have been many smart South Asians, is that US politics was not seen as a worthwhile pursuit. Thus, something like Jindal’s election could have happened earlier, but didn’t because of choices made by prior generations of Indians.

36. I have to tell some of you– being Christian didn’t make my life any easier. As Razib often mentions happened in his childhood, during which no one assumed he was Muslim, no one has ever looked at me and said, “obviously Christian”, even WITH my white-washed Bobby Jindal-esque first name. I look Indian, which to everyone I lived near or attended school with meant different, foreign, other, Hindu. Even when Christian people found out that I was Christian, I still wasn’t like them because I was Orthodox at a Catholic school, Indian at a Greek Orthodox church, vegetarian among beef-loving Malayalees.

    You can change your first name and your religion, name your first kid Apple (which I think is a hell of a lot worse than “Slade”) and do whatever the fuck else you want to sell-out and pursue this so-called easier path– but if you look like like you’re brown, that’s what you are. That’s how I’ve been treated.

    Also, if some of us choose the harder path, that doesn’t give us the right to hate on those who don’t. We chose what we did. That’s on us. No one owes us anything because of that and bitterness towards those who didn’t follow our hallowed example just diminishes the life we are living. My mom used to say similar to me all the time, when I was small and tried to point out how I was doing x and my sister was taking the easy route by doing y…”don’t be a martyr” etc.

    So no, it doesn’t resonate.

37. Perhaps one reason for the anger against Jindal (for being “white”-ish) is that some of the choices he made (e.g. conversion, choosing a name more easily pronounced by Americans, etc) were the exact decisions that those who are angry with him did not make, but could have as it would have made living in the US easier for them.

    Maybe for a few. But not for others like me. I have no wish to change my name(you can guess it be rearranging my nick). Hell, if I was called Anthony, I would have been happy with my given name. I don’t think my name makes it tougher for me by a significant margin The conversion. I doubt anyone wants to convert. Hell, I think my athiesm probably kills my political prospects than being Hindu. Besides, I do not think Jindal converted to Catholicism for political purposes though being a Catholic does help him politically compared to being a Hindu. Was it his dissatisfaction with his identity on a subconscious level that led him to examine his inherited faith cloesly? I have NO idea. But I am more inclined to believe it was more of a personal and social choice than political.

    If your theory is correct, there is NOTHING stoppping any one of his from changing their name or religion even now. So I doubt your theory. Let’s be blunt. It’s just a judgemental thing what we are doing and I have no problem with it. We are an Indian American blog first. So we tend to focus on that part of it even if it is not that important in the big scheme of things in Louisiana because the only reason he is news on this blog is he is of Indian origin. Over on political blogs, people like me speculate on the “he likes to distance himself from indianness” related part very rarely.

    Something that does make me wonder if we are too hard on him. The guy clearly doesn’t try to change his appearance from looking like an Indian immigrant from the 80s. If he was that desperate to escape his Indianness, wouldn’t he want to change his hairstyle and clothes? Pump up just a tad?

38. 487 · Praniv The guy clearly doesn’t try to change his appearance from looking like an Indian immigrant from the 80s. If he was that desperate to escape his Indianness, wouldn’t he want to change his hairstyle and clothes? Pump up just a tad?

    This is the best criticism I’ve seen yet of Jindal–yes!–he could use some Pal Zileri threads–if he comes to nyc, I can get him 25-35% off (even from “sale” prices!) at some boutiques in SoHo–still, he has a hot wife, so, perhaps I (&, implicitly, you) are being presumptuous here.

39. You can change your first name and your religion, name your first kid Apple (which I think is a hell of a lot worse than “Slade”) and do whatever the fuck else you want to sell-out and pursue this so-called easier path– but if you look like like you’re brown, that’s what you are. That’s how I’ve been treated.

    Bloody oath.

    vegetarian among beef-loving Malayalees.

    Eeeks. How could you sell your soul to the ‘Pattar’ brigade 😉

40. Also, one reason why we haven’t seen a South Asian become governor/US Senator/etc earlier, even though there have been many smart South Asians, is that US politics was not seen as a worthwhile pursuit. Thus, something like Jindal’s election could have happened earlier, but didn’t because of choices made by prior generations of Indians.

    As Camille has noted in other contexts, this is an ahistorical view. You can find a partial list of Indian-American (elected) candidates for city, county, state and national elective offices (mainly from the last two years) here. It runs into the dozens. As far as I know, the number of Indian-American candidates that have run for elective office has been in the dozens since at least 1992, with the success rate improving regularly since then. Though it did take what seemed like a long time to get the first Indian American Congressman (Jindal) since Dalip Singh Saund. That probably had as much to do with internal party issues and the overall demographic weight of the community as the specific candidates themselves.

    What By the book wrote about Rafiq Zakaria did surprize me. I couldn’t locate the whole article, but got the reference – 19 June 2002 in Asian Age – and found this excerpt:

    According to Dr. Rafiq Zakaria, “Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam who will be our next President, is by all accounts a great scientist; his contribution to India’s defence is of the highest order; he is rightly called the Missile Man; every Indian feels proud of him; he is in every respect a Bharat Ratna. But because he was born a Muslim, he should not be put in the same category as the two former Muslim Presidents, Dr Zakir Husain and Mr. Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad. Both of them were as great a patriot and Indian to the core as Dr Kalam. But they were also Muslims in the real sense of the word; they believed in the tenets of the Quran and faithfully followed the traditions of the Prophet. They worked for the uplift of Muslims as much as for the progress of India.” (The Asian Age, Delhi June 19, 2002).

    Link

41. Bloody oath.

    Now you have me thinking of the Koonen Kurisu Sathyam/oath. 😉

42. Is the Rhodes Scholarship really that easy to get? Or a degree in biology from Brown? How does someone who believes in teaching “intelligent design” manage to secure the Rhodes Scholarship? I suppose his stance against abortion under ALL circumstances could be attributed to his “system of values.” But with “intelligent design” it is simply a matter of having trouble with abstract ideas. With the heliocentric model of the solar system, I suppose you can provide “proof” without expecting the individual to make to many demanding logical inferences. You don’t have to be particularly bright to get it. So I understand why this isn’t a particularly contentious issue in the South. Evolution by natural selection is a far more abstract concept where you have to be able to integrate a number of different scientific observations and make a few key inferences. I can understand why ordinary folk in Louisiana would have problems with it. And really, who wants to be associated with chimpanzees if they didn’t know any better? But ‘Bobby’ Jindal has a Rhodes Scholarship and a degree in biology from Brown. Is he simply pandering to voters or does this guy actually believe this stuff? As an aside, a number of Canadians like myself have trouble appreciating the prestige of Ivy-league universities that on occasion churn out complete fucksticks. Like if Bush was an average student at Yale, what about an average student at an average university? Shudder

43. fucksticks

    loves it.

    p.s. Dubya was probably a legacy and thus, not necessarily smarter than your “average student at average U” example. Of course, I am biased, because I was an average student at average Davis, and I’m easily amused by naughty neologisms like “fuckstick”.

44. This guy is as Indian as Apu from the Simpsons; that is, only on the surface. Yes, great that the people of Louisiana have voted someone who looks like us as Governor. Its a small first step, but there is NO way he would have won if he ran as a Hindu named Piyush. I’ve been following this fool since I was in college; and it makes me sick that Indians are proud of this guy without probing into his policies: anti-abortion, anti-minority, anti-environment, evolution loving, and homophobic. Why weren’t all black folk happy when Clarence Thomas was elected? If anything, “Bobby” winning sends a sad message to future Indian-American youth that you have to destroy anything Indian about you, as much as possible, to win in politics.

45. No one is allowed to change their faith (they are only allowed to reject it),

    I guess my comments on this thread so far could indicate that I am of this mentality, since I stated that a) I personally find it difficult to celebrate Jindal’s victory on a ‘community’ level because I feel like his conversion, something which I am not likely to partake of, makes us completely different from each other (regardless of skin color) in the eyes of many American voters, and b) I am actually not all that religious (I guess a more descriptive term for it would be ‘questioning.’) I don’t think, though, that it makes me any more ‘desi’ than him. I totally underrstand your point about being brown regardless of what your religion is/what your name is/etc. And ons that level, I am amazed that Jindal has achieved this. But we’re not running for office, and I do think, that to many, if not most, American voters, Jindal’s first name being Bobby and his being Christian makes him more accessible and less foreign to them. (& I’m not indicating that any of this was politically motivated, because I don’t think we, or even Jindal himself, really have a way of knowing for sure) So it’s not that I think his transformation makes him ‘less desi,’ but that it makes him ‘more American.’

    But like Camille said, why are we talking about this anyway?? Heh.

46. If anything, “Bobby” winning sends a sad message to future Indian-American youth that you have to destroy anything Indian about you, as much as possible, to win in politics.

    I don’t think it does. There are many niches in American politics. People with Indian names have won office. Of course the totality of the changes probably helped him especially the religious one, but his looks still invited ethnic bias in the older elections. He did overcome that this time. And believe me, i say this as no fan of his. But it is noteworthy that someone who looks like him did win an election in that part of the country.

47. it makes me sick that Indians are proud of this guy without probing into his policies: anti-abortion, anti-minority, anti-environment, evolution loving, and homophobic.

    But what if there are “Indians” who are in agreement with some or all of his policies? Again, why are we assuming that everyone is pro-choice, pro-environment etc, that we all fit in one political box? And aren’t most people in Louisiana (who matter most anyway) fine with his views? I really feel like sometimes we forget that Jindal was running in that state and not wherever we are.

48. screamsou

    for the record, Tamil Tig’r, I know PLENTY of desi people who are anti-abortion, anti-minority, anti-environment, and so on. What exactly about our upbringings is supposed to make us so socially liberal? I mean, c’mon, we’re of the INDIAN SUBCONTINENT, the land of the Richard Gere-Shilpa Shetty scandal!

49. Awww, Nala honey…you know my parents?? 😉

50. churn out complete fucksticks

    as oppossed to those incomplete ones you guys up there have. i knew tis was all about penis envy.