Monthly Archives: February 2008

Lunchtime Viewing: “The Little Terrorist”

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Via Chapati Mystery, a fifteen minute short film called “The Little Terrorist,” which was nominated for an Oscar for best short in 2005. If you have fifteen minutes, you can watch it here (the first 30 seconds or so are black; be patient):

The video appears to have been posted by the production company itself, so you can watch in good conscience. According to the film’s website, it was filmed on location in a rural village in Rajasthan on a shoe-string budget.

Also, you may want to go straight to Video.google.com to view it on a slightly larger screen (especially if you want to read the subtitles).

One minor question to consider might be: what dialect are the villagers speaking? Would we simply call it “Rajasthani”? Continue reading →

Mera Farz? How do you say, “A Blogger’s Duty”, in Hindi?

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them lashes are real :D Dear ING Direct,

I blog this with a heavy heart.

Earlier today, mastervk submitted a link to a news story which caught my attention; it dealt with gender inequality and speaking out against a regressive advertising campaign in India. Duly noted, I thought, rather sure I was going to blog about it later. I saw the excerpt for this story a few more times throughout the day, but apparently I was not really understanding it, for if I had, the disappointment I suddenly feel would have flattened me earlier.

I didn’t realize they were talking about you.

You, ING, you are the one behind this?

In the commercial, the birth of a girl is followed by what the Delhi government considers as a derogatory statement: Hai To Pyaari Lekin Bojh Hai Bhari (Though loveable, she’s still a burden). “It sends out wrong message,” said education secretary Rina Ray. She has written to National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and Delhi Commission for Women(DCW) asking them to ensure the advertisement is withdrawn and also a public apology is issued by the insurance firm on all channels.
Ray is unhappy with the overall gender bias in the ad, particularly the scene which depicts fathers being weighed down by the financial costs involved in bringing up their daughters and funding their studies so much so that the ground beneath their feet caves in. Ray quotes a hospital scene from the commercial in her letter which depicts girls as a burden.
Ray said: “This is unfair. Parents spend money for a boy’s education too. Then why single out girls, especially when the country is positively debating women empowerment.”
The DCW has written to the insurance company asking them to stop airing the advertisement. “Promoting such biased views on the girl child may have a demoralising impact on women,” said Barkha Singh, DCW chairperson.

The TOIlet paper concludes with this paragraph: Continue reading →

The mini Hercules

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As a person who appreciates his time at the gym (and advocates fitness in general), I knew I had to post this story as soon as I read it earlier today. Meet India’s Aditya ‘Romeo’ Dev, the world’s smallest bodybuilder:

Unlike many dwarfs, Romeo is well proportioned, with a head circumference of 15in and a chest measurement of 20in.

Romeo said: “I’ve been training as a bodybuilder for the last two years and by now I think I must be the strongest dwarf in the world.

“I have always been fit but since I started working out, I have become famous for my strength. [Link]

I doubt very much that he is the strongest dwarf in the world, but I do admire his ambition. What I appreciate most about “Romeo” is that he just does his thing with confidence. One big fear some people have about going to the gym is that they will look weak in front of the rest of the “big muscle-bound” guys. As you can see from the pictures, Dev isn’t even afraid to wear Calvin & Hobbes shorts while working out:

Don’t stare without pinhole sunglasses

Finally, the media will have something from India besides the Little Superstar to talk about. At least this guy is a certified pimp.

Continue reading →

Evidence of Voter Intimidation

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In case you needed to have it pointed out, today was the so-called “Potomac Primary,” where the voters of Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. weighed in on their favorite candidate. My dad was one of the voters who showed up bright and early to get his vote in. I know that one’s ballot should be secret and that this is one of the fundamentals of our Democracy. However, I am a blogger, and our kind is not known for always playing fair. Thus, I will share with you all the first email in my inbox this morning:

from: Dad
to: Abhi
date: Feb 12, 2008 7:27 AM
subject: Hold on to your Dreams * Love ……..Dad

2-12-2008 [0829]

Abhi: I voted for Hillary – an hour ago. I urge you to think positive and hang on to your dreams.
Also please try and select life partner before next January !! Good luck !! Love…. Dad

My primary in Texas isn’t until March 4th. I am still one of those undecided voters that I usually deride during other elections. All my recent energy has been focused on choosing the best candidate to elect to office next January. Now I have another choice to make on my plate apparently. A friend who I forwarded the above email to replied with an insightful remark:

Well, if you think about it, it makes sense. What else happens next Jan? Obama becomes president. So it’s perfect — Abhi will find a life partner when a black man becomes president. See, our dads really do know everything.

Continue reading →

Thought Experiment: Jindal for Veep!

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I know it’s crazy, but maybe it isn’t as crazy as it sounds. So humor me as I go on a little thought experiment. Here are the circumstances where Bobby Jindal could end up as a Republican Vice Presidential candidate at the Republican Convention this summer:

First, presume that Sen. John McCain is the Republican nominee for the Presidency, and he’s running against a youthful, African American Barack Obama, who represents “change” and also “diversity” — and who is also a media darling. (That’s just a hypothetical; Hillary might very well win.) Against Obama, McCain looks very old and very white.

Jindal is both young and brown, and the novelty of putting him on the ticket might mitigate the novelty of a Barack Obama presidency somewhat. It would certainly generate a number of “isn’t it inspiring?” types of stories and editorials in newspapers and on cable news — lots of good press for McCain and the Republican party as a whole.

Second, McCain desperately needs to motivate the base — the really conservative members of his party — and one way he can do that is to pick someone for the Vice Presidency who is himself a thorough social conservative. Jindal, as we’ve already established, fits the bill, what with his opposition to abortion in every instance (“no exceptions”), his opposition to Stem Cell research, his support for the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools, his support for a constitutional amendment banning flag-burning, and his pro-gun outlook.

Finally, I don’t think McCain will ask Mike Huckabee to be his running mate, mainly because Huckabee, despite his obvious support, is seen by many conservatives as too soft on certain issues, including taxes and foreign policy. His humor and easygoing style is terrific, but he sometimes comes across as a bit nutty, and that could be a liability. If not Huckabee, who? (Not George Allen, I don’t think.)

(After I wrote this post, I went to Wikipedia to confirm a couple of facts, and I discovered that Rush Limbaugh apparently voiced the same idea on his radio show last week. Either that means I’m on the right track… or I’ve lost my mind!) Continue reading →

Forget Will Smith, Time For Karva Chauth

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In the past, I was somewhat snarky when it came out that Aishwarya Rai, before her marriage to Abhishek Bachchan, agreed to marry a Peepul tree because of her “Manglik” status. aishwarya-jodha-akbar.jpg

The New York Times had a story recently (thanks, Jamie), which described how Aishwarya Bachchan recently dropped out of a Hollywood project with Will Smith in order to be home in Mumbai to celebrate Karva Chauth.

For those who don’t know, Karva Chauth is a traditional Hindu festival where wives fast for a whole day without food or water as a symbol of their devotion to their husbands. I have many women friends who object to the festival as regressive, though I also know one or two people who do observe it out of a sense of loyalty to tradition. (Perhaps not too surprisingly, the women I know who observe it are NRIs, not ABDs. Are there any ABDs out there who observe Karva Chauth?)

Here is the quote the NYT gives regarding Aish’s decision to return to Mumbai for Karva Chauth:

Ultimately Ms. Bachchan chose to return to Mumbai and starve with a smile. National television channels covered her first Karva Chauth as headline news. Two months later she shrugged off her loss in an interview. “You do what you have to do,” she said. “Feeling torn and thereby unhappy, confused or guilty is not something I want to feel. So you make your choices and go with it. You get some and some you don’t.” (link)

What to say. From what I can tell, everything Aish does outside of her acting seems to reflect a pretty sincere traditionalism. One has to presume she’s observing Karva Chauth because she really wants to, not because anyone put pressure on her to do so. So, if we accept that the festival of Karva Chauth isn’t inherently sexist (and the case can be made that it is), here I’m inclined to give props to Aish for putting tradition over her career. It certainly beats America’s celebrity culture — which has lately just been depressingly bad, what with Britney losing her mind, and Amy Winehouse smoking crack…

On the other hand, the Indian media loves this kind of thing, so it may be that sacrificing a romantic comedy with Will Smith might actually help her Bollywood career — and she can have both. Jodhaa Akbar, anyone? Continue reading →

Duh, only Royals can be inbred.

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A British politician has caused quite a stir with his statements regarding the defective results of the arrangements Asians accede to…

A minister who warned about birth defects among children of first cousin marriages in Britain’s Asian community has sparked anger among critics.
Phil Woolas said health workers were aware such marriages were creating increased risk of genetic problems.
The claims infuriated the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) which called on the prime minister to “sack him”. [BBC]

As far as Woolas is concerned, he’s bravely confronting a worrisome issue which is politically incorrect; he has been quoted as saying he has an obligation to bring this up. He isn’t attacking the marriages as illegal or even a religious problem, his point is that this is a cultural practice which should be examined. Children of such unions are 13x more likely to suffer from recessive disorders.

“The issue we need to debate is first cousin marriages, whereby a lot of arranged marriages are with first cousins, and that produces lots of genetic problems in terms of disability [in children]. If you talk to any primary care worker they will tell you that levels of disability among the… Pakistani population are higher than the general population. And everybody knows it’s caused by first cousin marriage….Awareness does need to be raised but we are very aware of the sensitivities,” [BBC]

Critics wonder about his motives, since his political position deals with the environment instead of health. The timing for this hullabaloo in the empire’s orchard is awesome:

His comments follow the storm sparked by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who suggested some aspects of Islamic Sharia law could be allowed in Britain. [mirror]

Anti-green team, please note, both Woolas and the the cabinet minister who has his six, Geoff Hoon, are taking pains to point out that this conniption about cousin-coupling doesn’t involve the “wider Muslim community”; oh no, this backwardness is alll Asian.

The junior Minister has other vocal supporters besides Hoon: Continue reading →

Facebook loves us a little too much.

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Flying all over the intarwebs is an NYT article about Facebook— and how it is apparently the equivalent of a social networking roach motel; once you check in you can’t check out.

Are you a member of Facebook.com? You may have a lifetime contract. Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data. While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely.

The first flummoxed Facebooker quoted by la grey lady is brown!

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.

I understand that Facebook is ostensibly attempting to keep the reactivation process zimble, should one change one’s mind about one’s participation in this timesuck, but one might still find this policy douchey. (Now who has U2 stuck in their head? Just me? Meh. You kids and your tatti taste in music.)

Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers. Only people who contact Facebook’s customer service department are informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook.

Continue reading →

55Friday: The “Hail to the Thief” Edition

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Radiohead.hailtothetheif.jpg Once upon a time, every Friday at the Mutiny, we would have quite an orgy of a writing party, as we composed scintillating stories which had a maximum of 55 words.

Flash Fiction Friday (or the Friday55) has been on hiatus for a few months, but it seems like the time is right to commence creating again. 🙂 It’s a new year, it is time to discover new writers.

When we did this in the past, we’d have anywhere from a dozen to almost a hundred story submissions left in our comments section. How is such a thing possible? Well, as I mentioned above, at a wee 55 words, these were rather abridged stories.

I know I’m not the only one who is looking forward to reading the brilliant gems you mutineers tend to come up with. If it’s all still a bit unclear, I’ve got an example of nanoficiton for you to consider; I used to post tiny stories regularly on my personal blog, HERstory. Here is one of those short-short stories, to give you a sense of what they are like, and how zimble they can be, if you are not yet acquainted…

She nervously adjusted her sari, hoping no one noticed. So far, the night had gone flawlessly; she had made a good impression on everyone, she could just tell.

The older woman at the table noted how silk was tugged upwards. Taking a delicate sip of tea, she thought, “She’s not good enough for our family.”

And now, for some background on the genre:

Flash fiction, also called sudden fiction, micro fiction, postcard fiction or short-short fiction, is a class of short story of limited word length. Definitions differ but is generally accepted that flash fiction stories are at most 200 to 1000 words in length. Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word flash: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Traditional short stories are 2,000 to 10,000 words in length.[wiki]
One type of flash fiction is the short story with an exact word count. An example is 55 Fiction or Nanofiction. These are complete stories, with at least one character and a discernible plot, exactly 55 words long.[wiki]

I used to help organize a writing workshop in DC for would-be Lahiris and the one thing which was consistent was an inability to get started. If you looked around at the beginning of any warm-up or writing exercise, you’d observe a morose sort of gaze focused on one’s notebook, writing instruments quivering, and nothing marring those smooth sheets of paper or glare-ridden laptop screens.

To get around this for our Flash Fiction fiestas, I used to choose a song for our “theme”. It was always drawn from my music collection and usually, it was the sort of song one would have seen featured on the now-defunct, but ever-legendary 120 Minutes. This week, I’m going to veer from that formula in two ways. Our theme is the name of an album and a recent one, at that. In light of current events and primary colors, let’s ring around the rosy “Hail to the Thief (The Gloaming)”. More about that, after the jump. Continue reading →

Political parents are adorable

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Before SuperFaTuesday fades from our collective minds, I wanted to share a few different conversations that people have had with their parents about who to support.

Tamasha’s mother played true to her demographic and supported Hillary as did her “new-grandmother aunt”. I loved the conversation between Tamasha and her Aatya:

Aatya: Sweetie, can I make one last plea for you to vote for Hillary?
Tamasha: Um, it’s not really going to work, but tell me why you’re voting for her.
Aatya: Women have to vote for her.
T: Yeah, see, that’s not enough for me. Her being a woman, I mean.
Aatya: Women my age have to vote for her.
T: Huh?
Aatya: You haven’t had to face the glass ceilings that I have, working with men who have meetings in the men’s room and come back out zipping up their pants making proclamations.
T: Fair enough. But Obama has more things going for him that appeal to me, and he has specific ideas and beliefs that more precisely match up with mine.
Aatya: Just wait.Just wait until you have to go into the bathroom with these men while they pee and make decisions. [Link]

My mother feels similarly, although she put it in less colorful language. She simply said that it was time for a woman, and that she was tired of women hitting a glass ceiling, and being called shrill when they’re just being as aggressive as their male counterparts. She liked Obama plenty, but figured Obama could run in 4 or 8 years once he had a little more experience. Continue reading →