Monthly Archives: August 2008

A “Minority Majority” Nation

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With the DNC approaching, it is a good time to examine one very relevant recent piece of news that will surely impact my generation. The U.S. Census recently reported that by 2042, “Americans who identify themselves as ethnic and racial minorities” (NYT) will outnumber those who do not. This was earlier than the previously predicted 2050, and it is a trend that could have profound influences on all elements of American society. Here is a short summary of the demographic changes:

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.
The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3 million annually today to more than 2 million a year by midcentury, according to projections based on current immigration policies.
“No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change,” said Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a research organization in Washington. (NYT)

Jeffrey S. Passel, from the Pew Hispanic Center, says, “Almost regardless of what you assume about future immigration, the country will be more Hispanic and Asian.” When it comes to Asian-Americans, “People who say they are Asian, with their ranks soaring to 41 million from 16 million, will make up more than 9 percent of the population, up from 5 percent” (NYT). Here is the brief Wall Street Journal analysis of how this will impact politics:

The growing share of retired white baby boomers are more likely to be concerned about issues like pensions and health care for themselves and their parents. The growing share of minorities will be concerned about issues like education and job growth. “You always get that generational shift, but now there’s a racial layer over it,” says Mr. Passel.
Shifting demographics may change everything from local and national elections to bilingual education and the rationale behind affirmative-action plans. Already, fast-growing states in the Sunbelt and West are seeing signs that shifting demographics could alter state politics. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is campaigning hard in Nevada and Colorado — two states that were carried by President Bush in 2004 but have grown more Democratic as the states have added more young and minority voters.

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Barack Obama: “I’m a desi”

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Recently Jeff Yang of the San Francisco Chronicle sent me an article he had just published in that newspaper. He wrote:

I wanted to share with you guys the most recent installment of “Asian Pop”–which some of you may be aware now appears in both the online and the reconstituted wood pulp edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. The response to it has been quite interesting and, er, high-volume, from black, white and Asian American readers alike. Anyway, if you’re getting this then you’re someone whose opinion I value and whom I think might be interested in the issues involved here, and I’m curious about your thoughts.

Here are some excerpts from Jeff’s article:

“White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, he displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas…”

With these words in the New Yorker in 1998, Toni Morrison granted our 42nd president, William Jefferson Clinton, a kind of cadet membership in the grand cultural narrative of black America…

…reading Obama’s absorbing 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” it strikes me that the tropes that surround and define Obama can just as easily be read as those of another community entirely. Which raises the question: Could it be that our true first black president might also be our first Asian American president? [Link]

I will reserve my opinion of what I think of Jeff’s partially rhetorical question. Instead, I’d like to take you now to a fundraiser that happened Sunday in San Francisco (also reported in the SFChronicle):

The Illinois senator said it is “a testament to the American spirit that I’m even standing here before you” as the Democratic Party’s presumed nominee, because some Americans are “still getting past the name,” which he said some consider “funny.”

“Change is always tough, and electing me is change … and it means that people are going to hesitate a little bit,” Obama told a crowd of about 200 deep-pocketed supporters at a VIP reception for South Asian and Pacific Islander supporters at the Fairmont Hotel.

“Barack Obama – they’re still getting past that name,” he said. “…

Obama told the group – many of them Indian and Pakistani immigrants – that he is not only familiar with their cultures – but also proud of his lifelong associations with them. [Link]

And now for the money shot:

“Not only do I think I’m a desi, but I’m a desi,” he said, using a colloquial term that describes South Asian immigrants. The remark was greeted with laughs. “I’m a homeboy…” [Link]

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Collecting Tinsel

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Every few years we’ve asked why India’s performance at international sporting events is so poor (1, 2 for example).

Since independence in 1947, India has won 12 Olympic medals in 14 Summer Games – three fewer than Belarus won in 2004 alone. [Link]

Diagnosing India’s athletic failings seems to be India’s favorite sport:

Many theories have been proposed to account for India’s failure. Some experts say India has not much in the way of sports culture and few heroes; others blame a “corrupt sporting bureaucracy”. Things have got so bad that in the past, Indian sports ministers have suggested a moratorium on international competition to train athletes who will not be a national embarrassment. [Link]

Recently, two economists argued that a lack of social mobility is the key culprit:

Anirudh Krishna and Eric Haglund… said that the problem for India is … the number of people who can “effectively participate in sports”.

“Ill health and poor nutrition can hamper early childhood development. In addition, lack of information and lack of access can effectively exclude larges swaths of a country’s population. The resulting small percentage of effective participants helps explain more fully why despite such a large population and a large potential talent pool, a country ends up winning very few Olympic medals,” …

Controversially, the paper contends that social mobility is the key to countries’ success at the Olympics. Populations that are better informed and better connected to opportunities, in societies where information and access are widespread “tend to win a higher share of Olympic medals”, they said. [Link]

While they accept that low GDP has something to do with India’s performance, they point out that India underperforms even amongst its peers, arguing that Cuba, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Kenya and Uzbekistan have each done far better than India.

Over at Marginal Revolution, Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen places the blame on … a lack of government subsidy. If Tyler’s right, then we should see some changes in the short term, now that Mittal is putting his money behind athletes training for the 2012 Olympics.

The goal is to “put India on the medals grid” in the 2012 London Games by identifying India’s best young athletes and giving them the money to travel the world in search of the best competition and coaches. [Link]

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Three Kumars, how many medals?

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Right now, three of India’s five boxers are advancing to the quarter-finals in Beijing, putting them each just one win away from a medal: Akhil Kumar (bantamweight), his cousin Jitender Kumar (flyweight), and Vijender Kumar (middleweight).

Part time model, police inspector, and possibly India’s first professional boxer.

Given India’s poor showing in track and field, where all the athletes were eliminated in the qualification rounds, and the decision to pull India’s sole weightlifter after (what turned out to be a false) positive on a doping test, there is a lot riding on the performance of the three Kumars.

On the positive side, it’s a historic opportunity for India. Abinav Bindra’s gold medal was India’s first ever individual gold at the Olympics, if any of these three make it to the top, the country will celebrate as if Michael Phelps was their very own.

The fights promise to be exciting as well. Jitender, who is the only novice Olympian of the three, will next face off against three-time European champion Russian Georgy Balakshin in a rematch of their 2007 World Championship fight, where Balakshin prevailed by a single point. (clips from first round, via UB)

All three boxers (plus teamate Dinesh Kumar who got lost in the first round) come from a single boxing club – the Bhiwani Boxing Club in the village city of Bhiwani, Haryana, a place known as India’s “little Cuba”. This is the heartland of Indian boxing:

The place spawns hundreds of young fighters who spar every evening at the five local boxing schools. Here, learning to box is a passport to a secure government job and an opportunity to do something meaningful in life. [Link]

Up till now, boxing has received little popular recognition in India, something that might change after this Olympics:

It is not easy becoming a boxer in a cricket-crazy country. “People here think boxers are violent or mad” … “My blood boils when everybody goes gaga over cricket” says Vijender. [Link]

As a result, Vijender (the middleweight and possibly the most promising of the three) supplements the money that the government awarded him for victories in the Commonwealth and Asian Games with part time work modelling, and a job as a police inspector, all the time dreaming of becoming India’s first professional boxer:

“A promoter like Don King, a ring inside Madison Square Garden, and millions of dollars per bout. That is my dream, that is where I want to be,” [Link]

Who knows, he might just be a contender.

Update: And then there were two. Akhil Kumar lost to Veaceslav Gojan in the quarter-finals of the men’s 54 kg bantamweight category. Given that he narrowly defeated current world champion Sergey Vodopyanov on Indian independence day, this is must be a disappointment. (Video) (HT: Dhoni)

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Plushy Kali

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Remember Ghee Happy? This was Pixar illustrator Sanjay Patel’s take on the Hindu Pantheon, done in a drawing style that was hipster crossed with the Powerpuff girls.

At the time, Manish observed that

… any kid-safe interpretation of Kali is bound to cross the line into kitsch. [Link]

Sanjay is now going from 2-D to 3-D. He has a mockup of a plush Kali doll [via BB], and is in the process of looking for a manufacturer. Presumably, he’s looking to market this as a children’s toy, although somehow I suspect it will end up in more hipster cribs than kiddy cribs.

This is where my intuitions fail me. The book and prints and apparel all seemed like things that might be purchased by (some) ABD Hindus. Certainly the remarks in the comments of the original post were pretty positive about Sanjay’s renderings.

Would the same be true about the plushy doll? If not, why not? Here, the fact that I’m not a Hindu gets in the way of my ability to imagine people’s reactions. Is there a difference between a children’s t-shirt and a doll? Hindu iconography has long been used for commercial purposes, is this any different? Is this something that you would buy?

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Free and in DC tonight? Let’s help Padma.

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With all the tips you mutineers helpfully send in, plus the links you submit to our News tab, there’s no shortage of tragedies for us to read about, daily. Still, one recent story stands out to me as so heartbreaking, it’s apathy-shattering [via WaPo]:

With school out for the summer, Raju and Jayanthi Soundararajan took four of their children to India on a spiritual pilgrimage to visit Hindu temples, a guru, and friends and family left behind decades ago.
…while riding on a rural road in the southern part of the country, the Gaithersburg family’s rented sport-utility vehicle and a truck collided head-on, killing both parents and their two teenage daughters, 14-year-old Lakshmi and 16-year-old Priya. Only the hired driver and two of the Soundararajans’ sons survived, friends said.
Since then, the Washington area’s Indian community has come together to bolster an older daughter, who was not on the trip and has told friends that she wants to care for her brothers. Friends are raising money for Sairam, 11, and Pavan, 20, because both faced years of medical and education expenses even before they were seriously injured in the collision.

Imagine being in your 20s, working your day job and singing in a local band at night, doing whatever mundane things we all do…and then overnight, losing most of your immediate family– and realizing that you are the only person who two vulnerable boys have left, to advocate for and care for them. From akka to guardian, instantly…

Sairam is autistic, family friends say. Pavan, who is severely disabled with cerebral palsy, needs constant care. An Indian assistant helping the family with Pavan’s wheelchair also died in the crash.
“The crisis is not only the accident,” said Basil Rajakumaran, 76, a family friend in Gaithersburg whose cellphone rings every 10 minutes with people asking how they can help. “We have to take care of these children.”

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Game, Set, Somdev!

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Last night, I unexpectedly ended up at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic, where I watched Andy Roddick struggle early on and then barely defeat Argentina’s Eduardo Schwank (my tennis-obsessed date dismissively characterized it as “outlasting him”). I wasn’t that interested in watching Mandy Moore’s ex- swing, but the next match had me sitting up straight and paying rapt attention– and not just because I was suddenly court-side.

UVA’s beloved Somdev Devvarman, the reigning NCAA men’s champ (two years running!), played someone else and he did it so well, I don’t even remember who his opponent was. He was fierce, unrelenting…just a gritty player. It was mesmerizing to watch (and quite a thrill to out-shout the punk behind us, who was hating on our boy). Suddenly, for the first time in over a decade, I was interested in tennis again.

Behold, shady background info from wikipedia (I’m late for the match!):

Somdev Devvarman (also known as Somdev Dev Varman) is the reigning and two-time NCAA Men’s Singles Champion. As a recent graduate out of the University of Virginia who hails from India, Somdev is best known for having captured the 2007 NCAA Singles Championship by defeating Georgia Bulldogs senior John Isner in the final. In one of the most dramatic finals in the 123-year history of the tournament, Devvarman scored a 7–6 (7), 4–6, 7–6 (2) win over the tournament’s No. 1 seed. A year later, he defeated Tennessee’s J.P. Smith 6-3, 6-2 to take home his second consecutive NCAA Singles National Championship. It was his historic third consecutive appearance in the NCAA singles final.
Devvarman, the son of Ranjana and Pravanjan Dev Varman, was born February 13, 1985 in Assam, India. He has an older sister, Paulami, and older brother, Aratrik. The Dev Varmans originally hail from the north-eastern Indian state of Tripura. Devvarman picked up the racquet as a nine-year-old in Chennai in 1994 and after learning the basics he made it to the Britannia Amritraj Tennis Academy in 2000. [viki]

The video I embedded above will fill you in quickly– cheesy shots of him moving around like it’s a Sesame Street stop-animation-skit aside– about Somdev. He’s humble, cheerful and adorable. We likey. In fact, we likey so much, we may be live-micro-blogging it, via Twitter. If we can tear our eyes away from watching him play, that is… Continue reading →

NASA and the missing Indian children

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When I saw this headline on Monday I couldn’t help but laugh a little: Four [Indian] Kids on NASA Trip Go Missing. I mean, I know NASA is occasionally accused by some crackpot (even well-respected crackpots) of covering up info about aliens, but the idea of foreign kids going missing on a NASA field trip is a whole new kind of conspiracy (wrong kind of aliens). Here is how things unfolded:

The authorities of a private school here have lodged a police complaint that two of its students, who went on an educational trip to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at its US headquarters, have gone “missing.”

The two students, Paramjit Singh and Kunal Bhandari, went as part of a 13-member delegation of the Dayanand Model School on July 22. While the other members returned, these two students did not come back. [Link]

Then there was this:

Four students from a school in Parowal village who went on a trip to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have gone missing in the US. One of the teachers accompanying them has also not returned as she reportedly got married.

Eighteen students of the CBSE-affiliated Doaba Public Senior Secondary School went to NASA for a project. While 14 returned, Arshdeep, Sumit Sahni, Dalbir Singh and Baljinder Singh have not come back. The four are aged between 14 and 15 years.

“Teacher Meenu Sharma sent an e-mail to the school authorities, requesting them to extend her leave by a month as she got married,” a source said. [Link]

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SAFM-It’s been brung

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A confrontation I imagine in my head set to the tune of Beat It by MJ (its funnier in my head though):

South Asians for Obama: You better bring it you desi Republicans

South Asians for McCain: Oh. It’s been brung.

Remember when I wrote the following in my post about South Asians for Obama back in February of 2007 (yes, a year and a half ago)?:

In order to be fair and balanced I thought I’d link to South Asians for Rudy, or McCain, or Mitt but I wasn’t able to find such fundraising sites. I would be forever grateful to anyone that could alert me to such a development though. [Link]

Well, this week (less than 100 days before the election) desi supporters of John McCain have answered the challenge! IndiaWest reports:

Indian supporters of Republican presidential candidate John McCain are trickling out of the woodwork to battle the groundswell of support created by the South Asians for Obama campaign.

Last month, Suresh Kumar, CEO of NexAge Technologies USA in Iselin, New Jersey, launched South Asians for McCain. The nascent organization has picked up 85 members in the three weeks since its inception.

On the West Coast, Atul Saini, co-chairman of the Santa Clara County Business Leaders for John McCain, is attempting to mobilize the large contingent of South Asian business people in the Silicon Valley to vote for his candidate. [Link]

It is interesting to hear which issues motivate these two founders:

McCain is open to free trade, said Kumar, adding that his candidate was not opposed to work going overseas as long as it benefited U.S. interests. The veteran senator also supports lower taxes, which is especially important to small entrepreneurs, said Kumar, adding that “Lower taxes allow free enterprise to flourish.”

Most important to Kumar was the issue of terrorism. “Terrorism is the over-arching threat to civilized society and there is no focus on this issue as far as the Obama campaign is concerned,” he said, adding that McCain recognizes the need for a coordinated global effort to combat terrorism…

Saini said Indians are natural McCain supporters. “We come from India and we are very conservative, business-minded people,” he said, adding that the enterprise-friendly initiatives of McCain’s platform supported South Asian entrepreneurs. [Link] Continue reading →

Hanif Kureishi: One of a Kind?

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In between watching the glory that has been the Olympics (can’t say I expected so much Sepia-related content, but hey, awesome) and signing up to be one of the very few (10,000+ish) people to receive my very own VP text from Barack Obama, I came across this great piece in the NYT Magazine about Hanif Kureishi, his career, and his latest novel, Something to Tell You.

The novel is, in brief, about a member of the rebellious British South Asian generation, Jamal, that came of the age during the 80’s, and how he and his now successful peers have to overcome their past conflicts, loves, secrets, and continuing personal challenges as middle-aged parents and professionals. It actually sounds familiar in theme to My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru (a very nice book), except with a South Asian focus, and from the British reviews that have been published, it seems as though it will be a good read. I’ll be looking forward to reading it and the review world seems to see it as an improvement over his previous few novels, which have not been critically well-received. South Asian blog reviews of this novel have already been written, and it is to come out in America on August 19th.

The article highlighted more than his new novel – in particular, it noted how Kureishi’s emergence on the scene during the late 1980’s and his writings, including the screenplay of “My Beautiful Laundrette” and the novel Buddha of Suburbia gave a voice to a generation of South Asians in Britain that felt unrepresented and typecast in British society at Hanif_080424031803483_wideweb__300x375.jpg the time:

The novel and a subsequent BBC mini-series made Kureishi a hero to a generation of British Asians and other nonwhites, a kind of postcolonial Philip Roth who brought to the mainstream themes that were previously relegated as “ethnic” and added lots of sex and humor. “What, above all, made Kureishi a talismanic figure for young Asians was his voice,” the critic Sukhdev Sandhu wrote in The London Review of Books in 2000. “We had previously been mocked for our deference and timidity. Kureishi’s language was a revelation. It was neither meek nor subservient. It wasn’t fake posh. Instead, it was playful and casually knowing.“

Kureishi’s most important role was to knock down the stereotypical image of South Asian immigrants as the hard-working, polite and dutiful members of society who would make nor do no trouble. For a group of immigrants that had historically faced a great deal of discrimination in the U.K., there was finally someone who articulated their true lives and struggles. Perhaps most importantly, the writings were not staid nor politically correct – they showed life as it really was for immigrants and their children:

Sandhu (the critic) recalls how his father — who left India for England in 1965 and worked in a Nestlé factory, and was taunted by local schoolchildren and punks as he walked home with sacks of chapati flour — beat him up after Sandhu insisted that the family watch “My Beautiful Laundrette” on TV. With nudity, gay sex, Pakistani businessmen cheating on their wives and a drug smuggler disguised as a mullah with heroin sewn into his fake beard, the film wasn’t just a wake-up call to white Britain; it also flew in the face of the traditional immigrant narrative. “Why are you showing us such filth?” Sandhu’s father asked him. “My father was right to be appalled,” Sandhu wrote. “The film celebrated precisely those things — irony, youth, family instability, sexual desire — that he most feared.” It taught his father, Sandhu added, “that he could not control the future. And control — over their wives, their children, their finances — was what Asian immigrants like him coveted.”

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