Hey Bobby, this is how you answer questions on your Indian heritage.
[And now, the cursory South Asian American male objectification.] Isn’t he dreamy? 😉
UPDATE: He didn’t get voted off. Surprise. Someone should’ve bet me. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: March 2009
In Tune with Holi Memories
It’s rainy and cloudy in NYC, and quiet in my apartment, but I’m determined to transform my morning into a Holi celebration anyway. How? By listening to this awesome playlist of Bollywood Holi songs. 
The music is bringing back vivid, colorful memories of my childhood in Pune where I could hear music blaring over LOUDspeakers from the early morning hours to late at night. I’d stand in the balcony of our apartment with my sister and cousins and we’d fill up balloons with color water and drop them down on passersby. That was tame, believe me. In the opposite balcony, teenage boys would fill up buckets and pour out steady streams of red, yellow, green, and orange water! Below, people dressed in white shrieked in delight and emerged from the surprise bath with their hair, clothes, and faces completely soaked in all the colors of the rainbow. And, of course, there was the powder that, if you weren’t careful, would be smeared all over your face when you least expected it, getting into your nose, mouth, and ears. (Yes, bathing at the end of the day was always an ordeal!)
I’m not sure about Holi celebrations in the US, but in India, sales of the colored powder–which are mixed with starch and topia before perfumes and scents are added to give them a fragrance–are in the six-figure digits and grow at the rate of 15 percent per year, according to Reuters. In recent years, manufacturers have been responding to concerns about their safety (some contain lead) and expanding into the business of producing organic colors made out of fruits and vegetables.
During my college days, I helped organize a few Holi celebrations on campus. There was something immensely empowering about seeing a whole bunch of brown folks taking over one of the main quad lawns, playing loud Bollywood music (we even had a dhol player one year), dancing, and throwing colored powder all over each other. Sure, it attracted attention, but in those days (the mid 90s) when Indian students had less of a visible and active presence on the college campus, it was also an opportunity to share a unique cultural festival that transgresses religion with our peers and professors. By the end of the afternoon, the lawn would be packed with desis and non-desis alike and it was nearly impossible to recognize one another!
Although I don’t play much Holi these days (my celebration is limited to a few smears of color rubbed gently and affectionately on my cheeks by family members and vice-versa), I do miss the days of carefree abandon, masti, and rang. And to fill that gap, I turn to music which helps me relive my memories (until I figure out how to make new and better ones).
Even the Big B, who is not celebrating Holi in memory of the recent attacks on Mumbai, is aware of how closely the holiday is associated with “Rang Barse,” his signature dance and song from the film Silsila. Without it, this day is somehow not complete.
The Hindustan Times has a nice feature on musical Holi memories of various Bollywood music figures. What kinds of Holi memories do you have? Was it a festival you celebrated during your childhood or that you somehow celebrate today? Continue reading
Where the Indians are
Today’s NYT contains a useful graphical tool for displaying census data. The data being used is nothing new – it’s all census 2000 data — but the graphical display reveals patterns that you don’t notice in a table. The image below shows where immigrants from India are, with larger circles denoting the larger population clusters. (I focus on Indians because they’re the only South Asian group that this tool lets you explore)
The largest circles show populations of 50,000 or more. You can find them in Santa Clara county (just south of San Francisco), Cook County (around Chicago) and Queens, NY. Of course, the San Francisco and NYC clusters contain other large populations of Indians in adjacent counties, with a disontinuous mega cluster of Indians in the Boston to DC corridor.
It’s also interesting to see how few Indians there are in other parts of the USA. The very smallest dots on the map, the ones the size of flyspecs, those show populations of fewer than one hundred Indians, such as the 88 Indians in Jasper, MO. Basically, if you can’t see brown on this map, there weren’t Indians worth mentioning back in 2000.
It’s worth clicking on the image and going to the tool itself, since that graphic gives you information about the size of each of the clusters when you hover over any point. This is just a screen capture to show you where the IBDs are.
Move Over, Padma
I’m not the type to really follow New York Fashion Week (all bout L.A.!) but an article at Jezebel caught my eye.
There were 116 labels that held shows at the recently ended New York fashion week; that’s 3,697 spots in runway and presentation lineups. Of those, 668 were given to models of color — which, at just over 18%, is 6% better than one year ago. (And certainly better than in the fall of 2007, when WWD reported that one-third of the New York shows used no models of color at all.)[Jezebel]
The blog did further analysis breaking down the 668 models of color by race (41% Black models, 38% Asian models, 22% Latin models.) I know what you are thinking – where the Desi at? Using the nifty Desi Filter, I searched the names of the models of color in the top 25 shows in New York’s Fashion Week, just to see if the increased diversity included ‘our’ kind of diversity.
And the winner is, drum roll please…Lakshmi Menon is the only Desi model reppin’ on the runway at New York’s Fashion Week. Lakshmi appeared in the shows of Alexander Wang, Badgley Mishka, Carolina Herrera, Diane von Furstenberg, and Jason Wu. Looks like Padma needs to beware – there’s a new Lakshmi in town.
Who is Lakshmi? Born in Bangalore in 1981, she started modeling in 2006 and signed with Ford Agency. She is known for her “pout” and is seen as a “rising star.”
Tall and dark— in many ways, Lakshmi Menon is the typical ‘Indian’ beauty. But in many other ways, she’s as unconventional as they come. With a strong jaw line and endless legs, Menon is global fashion’s latest muse. She’s walked the ramp for biggies like Hermes, Jean Paul Gaultier, Issey Miyake, Stella McCartney, Ralph Lauren and Michael Kors.[Express India]
She has a short video diary from fashion week where you can catch her gorgeous accent. She also thinks you should visit Ladakh.
The good news: we had sexy, dark and lovely Lakshmi as our token brown skinned girl on New York Fashion Week’s runways. The bad news: Out of 3,697 spots, they couldn’t find another brown girl to step on to the runway? How is that possible? Desi girls are HOT. Have they seen the picture of Padma on a swing? Or Sunny getting out the vote? Or the desi cover girls on Indian Vogue, Indian Elle, or Indian Cosmopolitan? When in Delhi last month I spent hours in front of the magazine rack enamored by seeing beautiful brown women as cover girls. We have great potential desi supermodels, despite what ANTM may have us believe.
It’s great that the runways were more diverse this time around, but as far as I’m concerned, it wasn’t diverse enough. They can do better next time. As for now, I’ll take Lakshmi as our token, any day. Both Padma and Menon. Continue reading
Cyberabad 2047
I grew up reading almost exclusively sci-fi and fantasy books, sometimes one a day during the summers. I was like the main character in Oscar Wao except I wasn’t fat or bad with the ladies (well…I wasn’t fat). To this day, even though I blog for Sepia Mutiny and am surrounded by talented co-bloggers, some of whom are authors, I have never read a single book of desi-fiction. Ever. I have no excuse at all. It just hasn’t happened yet. I read books to escape into worlds that I can never be a part of, or to get smart on something that I want to know more about before I die. Desi-lit, no matter how far removed from my experiences, just seems too close. Every time I pick up a book of desi fiction I tell myself that this time I will read it, this will be the one…only to push it aside once again. Nobody has to tell me, I already know that it is my loss. I have a theory about books. I believe the right book falls into your hands when you are meant to read it. You don’t pick books, they pick you. I haven’t read a science fiction or fantasy book in at least a decade by the way.
The other day while reading Boing Boing I came across a book review that might just become my first desi fiction book. I say “might” because I can’t guarantee it until it happens given my fickle history. The book is titled Cyberabad Days: Return to the India of 2047 and is a collection of science fiction short stories:
Cyberabad Days returns to McDonald’s India of 2047, a balkanized state that we toured in his 2006 novel River of Gods, which was nominated for the best novel Hugo Award. The India of River of Gods has fractured into a handful of warring nations, wracked by water-shortage and poverty, rising on rogue technology, compassion, and the synthesis of the modern and the ancient.
In Cyberabad Days, seven stories (one a Hugo winner, another a Hugo nominee) McDonald performs the quintessential science fictional magic trick: imagining massive technological change and making it intensely personal by telling the stories of real, vividly realized people who leap off the page and into our minds. And he does this with a deft prose that is half-poetic, conjuring up the rhythms and taste and smells of his places and people, so that you are really, truly transported into these unimaginably weird worlds. McDonald’s India research is prodigious, but it’s nothing to the fabulous future he imagines arising from today’s reality. [Link]
Oklahoma, this is not OK
Last week, the Oklahoma House passed H.B. 1645 which states that you can’t cover your head in your driver’s license photo for any reason:
Hats, head scarves, head garments, bandanas, prescription … glasses … are strictly prohibited and shall not be worn by the licensee or cardholder when being photographed for a license or identification card.
It means that religious Sikhs, Jews, Muslims and others who wear religious head covering will have to choose between their faith and their ability to travel.
The legislation was proposed in a fit of pique, after the Oklahoma Department of Transportation reversed itself and allowed a young hijabi woman to have her license photo taken with her head scarf on and her face clearly visible, but without her hair showing.
<
p>Represenative Rex Duncan was so incensed by this that he took over a different bill
, with a different purpose, and “hijacked it” to create requirements that the bureaucracy says it doesn’t need, that it will have to defend in court, and that don’t really make a lot of practical sense.
Why don’t I think the bill makes sense? Imagine that I actually did what the law wanted (which I wouldn’t, I would leave the state) and got my photo taken with a naked head. Do you think that a cop would find it easier to recognize me with my glasses and turban from a photograph of me with my hair down and my beard unfurled, man on the cross ishtyle? How about the TSA person at the gate at Tulsa airport?
The bill is also inconsistent. If the legislature seriously believes that hair is a critical part of identification, this is what they would have to do:
- Mandate no toupees or hairplugs or extensions — sorry, Represenative, but you have to go baldy now
- Mandate no changes to facial hair
- Mandate no changes in hair color or style — sorry Represenative, but your wife can’t color that grey out, and your daughter who had long brown hair can’t drive now that she has short pink hair unless she had the photo taken with the short pink hair, in which case you have to live with it from now on
- Mandate that any time somebody does change hair color or style they have to have their photo retaken
- Apply the bill retroactively, so that everybody whose appearance has changed at all since their photo was taken has to get a new ID
Can you imagine? The hairdresser’s lobby would kill that bill deader than a combover on a red carpet!
Here’s a petition in opposition to the bill. Right now, the bill is in limbo, since the Senate sponsor has backed down after talking to the transportation bureaucracy and finding out that they don’t actually want these changes. I’m hoping the pressure keeps it that way, and that they recognize that they will face opposition if they proceed with their hair-brained (sic) scheme.
Inheriting…a bunch of dating problems
The Washington Post featured an article this morning about ethnic dating patterns, primarily those in the Asian and South Asian American communities. At first I assumed, “here we go again, another hackneyed piece about arranged marriages or something.” While there were a few clichés in the article, it did feature an intriguing revelation (to me at least). 2nd generation South Asian Americans (like some other ethnic groups), are increasingly marrying within their race. The magnitude of the trend was somewhat shocking to me since South Asian Americans are better assimilated than our European counterparts, and truly homogeneous ethnic enclaves which would foster such trends are very rare in the U.S. I thought for sure there would be a minor slope in the opposite direction:
The number of native- and foreign-born people marrying outside their race fell from 27 to 20 percent for Hispanics and 42 to 33 percent for Asians from 1990 to 2000, according to Ohio State University sociologist Zhenchao Qian, who co-authored a study on the subject. The downward trend continued through last year, Qian said.
“The immigrant population fundamentally changes the pool of potential partners for Asians and Hispanics. It expands the number and reinforces the culture, which means the second generation . . . is more likely to marry people of their own ethnicity,” said Daniel T. Lichter, a sociologist at Cornell University.
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Increasingly, singles are turning to a growing number of niche dating sites on the Internet, such as http://Shaadi.com and http://Persiansingles.com. [Link]
A recent book titled Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age also tracks the dating and marriage patterns of 1.5 and 2nd generation South Asian Americans and finds similar results:
Researchers spent a decade following 3,300 children of immigrants in the New York region as they navigated adulthood, which led to a study published last year called “Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age.” They followed both the “second generation” children born in the United States and the “1.5 generation” — children of immigrants who came as youngsters — who were Dominican, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans and West Indians.
Researchers found that their subjects were constantly struggling with the desire to be open to people of all backgrounds vs. family expectations, and their own desires to sustain their culture. Most paired with others who shared similar racial or language backgrounds. [Link]
Love don’t come easy
When our parents ask “Beta/i, why aren’t you settled yet?” We like to respond that it’s just much harder to find somebody in American than it was back in the desh. Well, it seems that men and women in India don’t have it so easy either.
Consider the eligible bachelors of Barwaan Kala who remain unmarried because the ladeez (and their parents) consider the village a tad too rustic:
Some 121 villagers aged between 16 and 80 remain bachelors, they say, because of the remoteness of the village. The last wedding in the village was reportedly 50 years ago… the reason for the high number of bachelors is not because they lack eligibility but because there is no approach road to the village. [link]
After 100 50 years of solitude, they were given hope that the government would listen to their pleas when a politician asked for their votes and promised that he wouldn’t get married either unless he could get them a road. Unfortunately, that hope was cruelly dashed the next year:
But, after winning, the new Member of the Legislative Assembly not only got married the next year but, in the villagers’ eyes, added insult to injury by making the event a gala affair. He is now the proud father of a two-year-old daughter. When the villagers approached him to remind him of his promise to them, they say he asked them if they really believed that he too should remain a bachelor forever. [link]
So now the villagers have decided to take the grasp the problem firmly with their own two hands, and are laboring furiously to produce a solution. In the past six weeks half the road has gotten laid, with an equivalent amount of laying still to be done.
“Who among you,” she asked “will donate to me your sperm?”The story is pure Bolly. You have desperate villagers, a perfidious politician, and an epic effort by the men to build a bridge to romance, much like Rama building a bridge to Lanka to rescue Sita.
There’s even a Jindalesque moment in the plot where the villagers are told that they cannot build the road themselves, because they are in a protected wildlife area and they have to satisfy the red tape! (We’re currently at the cliffhanger moment right now … )
There’s one problem – I don’t believe it. If nobody has gotten married in 50 years, then how are there 16 year old boys in the village?
How Many No Money Boyz are Named…
Ickitt.
Our bittersweet SepiaIcon(TM), (aka M.I.A., aka Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam) and her musician/son-of-billionaire partner Benjamin Brewer welcomed a bouncing baby boy on February 11th. And then proceeded to name him…Ickitt.
Ickitt Brewer. I suppose it’s better than Bronx Mowgli. And as Shitals, Anoops, Chitranis, Vishalis, Gurpreets and so many more, we are not in a position to judge. Are we?
CUE debate over traditional inherited jaw-breakers v. attention-getting “creative” monstrosities.
So which is lickle Ickitt? I’m Sri Lankan, and I have to say I’ve never heard of it. But, to be fair, on my last visit in 2006, newspaper editorials were bemoaning the fact that new parents were ignoring traditional names in favor of made-up mash-ups. Yeah, there are Sri Lankan equivalents to Pilot Inspektor and Audio Science. (Ok, not really. I just wanted to throw those out there. The Sri Lankan parents were stringing together nonsensical syllables that sounded pretty, not naming kids after curriculum subjects from a technical college.)
I leave it to you, dear readers. Ickitt – have you heard of it? Does it harken to the desh?
Ah, screwitt, I guess it does have a certain ring to it.
UPDATE: It’s a hoax, I was had…now I’m off to tell the blog that broke this where to stickitt. Continue reading
Amartya Sen, on the Recession, Adam Smith, Keynes, and Kerala
I was recently talking to a financial consultant visiting from India about the state of the Indian economy (she recently married my cousin; congrats. P & S!). She seemed to think that, despite how gloomy the Indian television news analysts tend to be, the Indian economy is actually continuing to grow somewhat even as western economies are sliding into a deepening recession. A quick look at the Economist’s latest country data for India seem to confirm that outlook: India’s economy is still forecast to grow at a 5% rate this year. That’s down from 9-10% in the past few years, but growth is growth. (She suggested that Indian business news analysts might be channeling the gloom of their western counterparts, rather than using actual data particular to the Indian economy.) Have readers seen other data about the state of the Indian economy as a whole?
That might lead us to Amartya Sen. Sen has an essay re-appraising of the works of Adam Smith in light of the current global economic recession in a recent New York Review of Books. His basic point seems to be that Adam Smith was right, though perhaps hardcore free market types today tend to misread Smith as advocating unregulated free markets. Sen also notes that Keynes is currently more popular than ever, though he argues that Keynes’ contemporary at Cambridge, Arthur Cecil Pigou, might be more helpful to us today because of the latter’s work on the role of behavior in shaping markets (behavioral economics), as well as welfare economics.
In a discussion of the possible role that reforming health care might play in government-supported economic recovery programs, Sen makes an interesting side-note about health care in Kerala as compared to China:
A crisis not only presents an immediate challenge that has to be faced. It also provides an opportunity to address long-term problems when people are willing to reconsider established conventions. This is why the present crisis also makes it important to face the neglected long-term issues like conservation of the environment and national health care, as well as the need for public transport, which has been very badly neglected in the last few decades and is also so far sidelined—as I write this article—even in the initial policies announced by the Obama administration. Economic affordability is, of course, an issue, but as the example of the Indian state of Kerala shows, it is possible to have state-guaranteed health care for all at relatively little cost. Since the Chinese dropped universal health insurance in 1979, Kerala—which continues to have it—has very substantially overtaken China in average life expectancy and in indicators such as infant mortality, despite having a much lower level of per capita income. So there are opportunities for poor countries as well. (link)
Interesting that Sen singles out Kerala; I wonder where he got that information from. Also, I wonder what the differences are between Kerala’s current health care policy and that of other Indian states. (Or, is this just yet another case of “everything is better in Kerala”?)
Also see: Wikipedia on Health Care in India, Palliative Care in Kerala Continue reading